About parenting.

I'm in no position to make judgements about parenting but I'd like to share a few observations from my time in the Transkei.

My idea of parenting is to plan a pregnancy, read all the books, go to the scans and the classes then attend the birth. Take the baby home to a freshly painted nursery and basically put a lot of time and effort into the process.

It is no surprise that the reality in the Transkei is quite different but I didn't expect it to be this different. Firstly, girls tend to get pregnant very young and they are getting younger. Fourteen seems to be common and it is unusual not to have a child by twenty. There is some debate about why teenage pregnancy is on the increase, some say that the girls need to prove their fertility before a man will marry them, others that the girls are after the social grant money that comes with having a child and others that girls are just growing up faster and having sex younger. To be honest I wouldn't like to say what the reason is but it is a worrying trend.

These girls are all unmarried and the interesting thing is that because of this the child belongs to her whole family rather than to her. This means that if she has two or three children and then gets married she doesn't take those children into her marriage, in fact she may not even count those children when you later ask her how many children she has had. Instead the children stay with the family which often means the wife of her eldest brother. Therefore if a woman marries a man with several disorganised sisters she might end up having to raise a whole group of children who are not even blood relatives.

I can imagine that most maternity wards in first world settings these days are full of pround men weilding video cameras and mobile phones. I've yet to see a man within 50 yards of our maternity ward (except the doctors and nurses). The area we use to care for the sick newborns is also much quieter that I would have thought. I don't think the women are uncaring for their infants, perhaps they just want to let the medical staff care for them until they are ready to be nursed by the mother but I seldom see them camped out beside the cot.