Fathers more than financial providers
FATHERS matter, and yet South Africa’s unemployment crisis plays a major role in the presence of men and how they show up in their children’s lives.
According to the findings in the third State of South Africa’s Fathers, a research report released this week, men have been conditioned to believe that as fathers, their duties are purely financial and when they can't make a monetary contribution they stay away, leaving women to carry the burden of child care.
The latest research shows that more women (85.1%) than men (79.8%) in South Africa said that they provided financial support to their biological children but despite this fathers were not taking up a greater share of caregiving roles. It meant that in homes where fathers are uninvolved or entirely absent, mothers often carry the dual burden of caregiving and financial provision.
Dr Mandisa Malinga, one of the project researchers, told the Independent on Saturday that while men understood that fatherhood was important, they saw their role as that of financial “providers” and if they were not able to provide they also failed to show up in other ways.
She said men who were unemployed often just stayed away until they were able to support their children and families, while others were part of the household but they didn't actively participate in their children’s lives. In households where fathers are uninvolved or entirely absent, mothers often carry the dual burden of caregiving and financial provision, which in many cases, still strains the household resources and impacts children’s access to opportunities, she said.
“A lot of men that we've engaged with feel that because I'm not doing the primary responsibility of a man and father, I'm useless and therefore I shouldn't show my face at all. And I think it's a challenge because with these structural issues, we see women are taking up more work, and then women are carrying that economic burden alongside the nurturing and care work. But we don't see men taking up more of the care work in the absence of being able to provide.”
Malinga said this lack of present fathers also meant that young men did not have positive role models who they could learn from.
“We need men who will model positive forms of manhood or masculinity. And when we don't have that, we'll have these negative cycles of violence that reproduce themselves. And so we need men to be present, but we don't just need men to be present, because a violent father is not going to be good for a child. We need positive male engagement with children.”
She said this was not only good for the child but also good for men to be actively and positively engaged in their children's lives.
The third State of South Africa’s Fathers report also showed that in 2023, only 35.6% of South African children lived in the same household with their biological fathers, and 40.3% lived with men who were not their biological fathers.
Malinga said that more children are living with "social” fathers like uncles and grandfathers, rather than biological fathers.
These men were the ones who were present in the children’s lives and who filled the gaps like dropping them off at school. “And when we start tapping into that space, we'll understand how we draw on these men who can then better support mothers in the absence of biological fathers. And I think, again, the research is clear that children need a positive healthy male adult. It does not necessarily have to be a biological father if the father's not there,” she said.
The report was compiled by Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town and the Africa Health Research Institute.