Educational Support and Children’s Living Arrangements over the Life Course

Sangeetha Madhavan, University of the Witwatersrand

Studies have repeatedly highlighted the importance of a child’s living arrangements for understanding educational attainment in developing countries. In particular, the evidence suggests that the presence of parents has a positive effect on a child’s educational attainment. However, what we lack is a clear understanding of the mechanisms by which the people who live with a child influence the child’s schooling and of the roles of people who live elsewhere. Most studies rely on cross-sectional data. In contexts characterized by high mobility and economic instability, children live with various sets of people over their lives and receive support from kin and non-kin living with them and living elsewhere. Using highly detailed data from the Bushbuckridge region of Limpopo Province in South Africa, this paper investigates the contributions of the people children live with and the support they receive from others over their lives. The data for this analysis comes from a recently completed project on children’s social connections and well-being funded by the National Science Foundation. The field research was conducted in association with the Agincourt Health and Population Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand. The author and the principal investigator spent nearly 4 months conducting intensive fieldwork on 12 “contact groups of socially connected households. Starting with 12 contact children in two villages in the Bushbuckridge region, we collected observational and standardized data on not only these children but also on all the people, children and adults, with whom these children are connected. The research yielded extensive family trees for 12 kin groups, a substantial amount of observational data on all the households within these groups, interviews with key informant on selected topics, anthropometric measures for all children under the age of 18, feeding and nutritional data and residence/education histories for all children under the age of 21. This paper uses the residence/education histories that identify every person who the child has ever lived with, the kinship link of this person with the child, the type of contact the child has had with the person, every person who ever provided support for the child, the child’s educational progress, and any notable event (pregnancy, illness) in the child’s life. The analysis for this paper uses 323 residence/education histories. It describes: 1) the residence patterns of children over the life course in terms of kinship relationships and place of residence and; 2) support given to children by co-resident and non-co-resident others over the life course. I also present indices to measure the extent of overlap between co-residence and support for children. In addition, I explore differences by gender and age and variation amongst siblings in educational support across the life course. Case studies of individual children incorporate other data including genealogies and observations to provide a fuller context in interpreting these patterns. This analysis addresses several questions. One, to what extent do co-residential adults provide educational support in the form of money for school fees, uniforms and materials? Two, what is the role of parents and what is the relationship between co-residence with their children and providing material support for their children’s schooling? Three, how important is kinship in defining support links for children? Four, does support for different siblings come from different sources? Significantly, this paper extends its analysis beyond the boundaries of the household to identify all the people who make a difference to children’s access to education. The data enable an analysis of gender differences in education support and attainment, the dynamics of child fosterage, and other demands made on children’s time that affect their chances of attending school. There is a pressing need to move away from the centrality of co-residence as the defining support feature in a child’s life. This is particularly important for educational support, which, comes in varied forms from a variety of sources and therefore, has a variety of implications for a child’s educational progress. Without denying the importance of parents’ presence and involvement for their children’s schooling, this study shows that the parent-child relationship is complex and cannot be restricted to co-residence. Children’s access to schooling and their educational attainment depend on a set of relationships that extend beyond the nuclear family and the residential household.