Pretoria - Black and coloured South African children aged under five remain “perpetually disadvantaged”, living most often in households without either parent, where access to safe basic services is problematic, as is food security. Social grants provide a lifeline.
This emerged from the Stats SA’s report “South Africa’s Young Children: Their Parents and Home Environment, 2012” released on Monday, the latest of a series of data reports linked, among others, to the general household survey conducted every year.
Last year, South Africa had 5.3 million children aged under five, or about 10 percent of the population. But just over one in three, or 36 percent, lives with both their biological parents, even though 93.5 percent of biological parents were alive. Of those children not living with one or either of their parents, the majority were raised by grandparents: last year it was 85 percent, a level which has remained largely unchanged since 2002.
And the Stats SA survey also highlighted a social oddity: mothers and fathers seemed at odds over whether they were married, or not. While 60 percent of fathers said they were legally married, and 35 percent said they were living together with mothers, only 31 percent of mothers said they were legally married. Another 18 percent of mothers said they were living together with the father of their child or children, while 48 percent of women said they were single.
“Who are they married to? It’s a very interesting phenomenon in South Africa. The sociology does not add up,” said statistician-general Pali Lehohla.
Some 45 percent of black children under five live in households headed by a single mother, and 21 percent in a household with neither biological parent. Among coloured households 38.3 percent of children under five live with single mothers and 5.8 percent in homes with neither parent. In contrast, 86.5 percent of white children live in homes with both parents.
With 66 percent of children under five receiving social support, either through foster care or child support grants, the centrality of these grants emerges particularly for children raised away from both of their parents, or by a single mother.
Grants make up the main income for 48.9 percent of homes where children under five live without either parent and in 39.7 percent of homes headed by single mothers. Just 12.6 percent of households where both parents are present cite grants as the main source of income.
In 35 percent of black households, grants are the main income, while this is the case in 15 percent of coloured homes.
According to the Stats SA report, money for food ran out in 32 percent of black households, while 30 percent said they cut down the size of meals and another 30 percent said they ate a smaller variety of food because there was not enough in the house. Another 26 percent of black households said they skipped meals because there was not enough food in the house.
A quarter of coloured households ran out of money to buy food, another 25 percent cut meal sizes and 25 percent also ate a less varied diet because there was no food in the home. In contrast, only 2 percent of white and Indian households were so affected.
On the upside, the Stats SA report clearly showed Home Affairs’s drive to register babies within 30 days is paying off: only one in five births was registered late last year, significantly down from 78 percent in 1998.
And if a birth was registered late, it seemed linked to the mother’s age, either very young or over 50. Timeous registration hit the 80 percent mark for mothers aged between 20 and 39, while 35 percent of mothers aged up to 19, and a whopping 84 percent of mothers older than 50 registered their newborns late.
The median age of mothers is 27, which seems to contradict the perception young women were falling pregnant to receive the child care grant.
Mothers tend to be a bit older in Gauteng – 28.4 on average – while the youngest average age for mothers is in KwaZulu-Natal at 26 years old.
The majority of children under five, or 21 percent, live in KwaZulu-Natal where 19.8 percent of South Africa’s population lives, followed by Gauteng (20 percent), which accounts for 23.7 percent of the country’s population, and the Eastern Cape (14 percent). While in Gauteng almost all children live in urban areas, followed by the Western Cape where 96 percent live in urban areas, 90 percent of children under five in Limpopo live in rural areas.
There are more boys than girls aged up to two years, indicating a potential future demographic shift from the present situation, where women make up 51 percent of the country’s population.
Political Bureau