Child-Headed Households

In recent years the international community has paid closer attention to the phenomenon of child-headed households; these are households where a child has taken over the majority of responsibilities of the main caregiver. The primary factors leading to this situation are HIV/AIDS, poverty, conflict and the disintegration of the traditional extended family network. Although children who are deprived of adequate parental care have the right to alternative care, millions of children – including those living in child-headed households – have no recourse to this fundamental right. This study presents an overview of alternative care as well as the factual situation of child-headed households in a selected group of focus countries in sub-Saharan Africa and further provides recommendations aimed at both legal and policymaking issues relating to the existing alternative care systems. This research seeks answers to the question: “What does the internationally recognised right to alternative care for children entail and is the recognition of child-headed households as a form of alternative care in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international standards which have been adopted as a measure to protect the inherent rights of children to protection, development, survival and participation?”

The Gauteng Department of Social Development contracted Chiastolite Professional Services to conduct a census of child-headed households in Gauteng and to collect in-depth qualitative data on these households. The aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of child-headed households in Gauteng in order to establish a database and to ensure access to programmes by needy child-headed households.

A three-stage research design was used: Stage 1 entailed a wide-spread mobilisation of the Gauteng community through mass media, community walks, posters and pamphlets, and liaison with local government structures, schools, clinics, welfare organisations and churches. The purpose of this stage was to identify child-headed households either directly or through service providers and key stakeholders. Ultimately, over 6,000 households believed to be child-headed were captured into a contacts database. Stage 2 entailed door-to-door visits to all of these households and the completion of a brief demographic questionnaire that was captured in the database of child-headed households. A total of 63 households were verified as being child-headed by the end of July 2008. Stage 3 entailed an in-depth combined qualitative/quantitative study of these households to determine their psychosocial and service delivery needs. A total of 61 households participated anonymously in this survey.

This chapter deals with the agency of children and young people in child-headed households in South Africa. It is argued that, though such youngsters need to run their own household,  have to execute adult tasks and responsibilities and sometimes are legally adults (eighteen years or older) they do not have adult status. This is because childhood and adulthood is not defined by biological age and not reached when a child turns eighteen. Understandings of childhood and adulthood vary widely between and within cultures. The concept 'generational constructions' is used to point to these social cultural meanings of childhood. The ideas about and characteristics of childhood and adulthood result in generational rules that severely limit children’s room to manoeuvre in coping. Agency is perceived as both the observable actions of children and the meaning, motivations and purposes which children bring into their actions. By focussing on the latter, it becomes clear that children are able to bend the generational rules. The author discusses children’s narratives on the support they receive and seek, the choices they were able to make and their position as children with adult responsibilities.

Background: The phenomenon of children/youth head of household has become common globally. If
their expressions are quite similar despite the environment in which they occur, they vary in causes
which can be chronically ill parents, death of parents or parents moving 2 seasonally to fields. However,
the literature is scarce on the children/youth head of household in Congo and also the displacement to
fields as a cause of child headed household is new in the literature. Hence the purpose of this study is to
describe the conditions of the head of household children whose parents have moved to the fields.
Methods: Cross-sectional study of 181 households headed by children selected by convenience was
conducted in Oicha and a questionnaire was administered.
Results: Children are facing medical (pregnancy, sexual assault/ sexual abuse, and diseases of children at
night), social (debts in the neighborhood, and division of labor, and indiscipline), and educational (school
dropout due to hunting of school fees, etc.) problems.
Conclusion: the medical, sexual, educational data challenges their implications are (in practice, research
and health policy) were given.

Although ethnographic research requires researchers to become highly involved in the lives of their respondents, in research reports or articles one rarely finds how the researcher dealt with his or her involvement, how this influenced the execution of the research, the interpretations and
the outcome. In this chapter, I discuss the issues that I faced during my research among children and young people living in so-called child-headed households in a disadvantaged community in South Africa.

A major unanticipated effect of the research was the emotional effect on myself. Doing research to children and young people in such difficult situations requires emotion work. In the conclusions I will make some suggestions for dealing with the emotions of respondents and one own emotional involvement. Overall, existing ethical guidelines only seem to provide a guide that helps researchers to consider potential ethical issues. Because all circumstances differ, a set of ethical values should be developed with room for flexibility. As ethical dilemmas may arise at any stage of the research and are also not always
anticipated, the researcher needs to be continuing reflecting and adapting these guidelines.

This paper explores the ways that young people express their agency and negotiate complex lifecourse transitions according to gender, age and inter- and intra-generational norms in sibling-headed households affected by AIDS in East Africa. Based on findings from a qualitative and participatory pilot study in Tanzania and Uganda, I examine young people's socio-spatial and temporal experiences of heading the household and caring for their siblings following their parent's/relative's death. Key dimensions of young people's caring pathways and life transitions are discussed: transitions into sibling care; the ways young people manage changing roles within the family; and the ways that young people are positioned and seek to position themselves within the community. The research reveals the relational and embodied nature of young people's life transitions over time and space. By living together independently, young people constantly reproduce and reconfigure gendered, inter- and intra-generational norms of ‘the family’, transgressing the boundaries of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’. Although young people take on ‘adult’ responsibilities and demonstrate their competencies in ‘managing their own lives’, this does not necessarily translate into more equal power relations with adults in the community. The research reveals the marginal ‘in-between’ place that young people occupy between local and global discourses of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ that construct them as ‘deviant’. Although young people adopt a range of strategies to resist marginalisation and harassment, I argue that constraints of poverty, unequal gender and generational power relations and the emotional impacts of sibling care, stigmatisation and exclusion can undermine their ability to exert agency and control over their sexual relationships, schooling, livelihood strategies and future lifecourse transitions.