A father’s battle to get the issue of paternity leave on the agenda in Parliament may be heading to the Constitutional Court, depending on the presidency’s response. On May 22, Hendri Terblanche, frustrated by the silence of Parliament’s select committee on petitions and executive undertakings, wrote to President Jacob Zuma and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa…
Category: Family
Friday laughs: Comedian Michael McIntyre on what “people with no kids don’t know”. Image – Screengrab of the video
Tammy-Ann Julies* remembers “feeding” her eldest son alcohol for the first time about two years ago. It was a late Friday afternoon and the then eight-year-old Owen* and his mother shared a 750ml bottle of Black Label beer. They were sitting in the houthok [wooden shack] that Julies (30) and her husband (36) had built…
A major study published in one of the world’s leading medical journals has concluded that there is no link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination and autism in children. The findings from the study of a cohort of around 95 000 children will not surprise most scientists, who have been reassuring parents of the…
Annegret Raunigk, a German woman, is at the age of 65 to give birth to quadruplets. The news has elicited oratorios of comment: a chorus of disapproval, followed by a descant of cries of “Double standards! What about old fathers!”. In fact, this woman’s decision to continue to reproduce long after most of us have…
A 65-year-old German woman who is due to give birth to quadruplets has defended her decision and says she is looking forward to the challenges ahead. Annegret Raunigk, who is in her fifth month of pregnancy, said she had decided to get pregnant after her nine-year old daughter, Lelia, told her she would like a…
The tiled lounge in the Midrand apartment has three brown suede couches with metal legs arranged against the white walls. A small, low table draped in a red cloth and surrounded by children’s plastic chairs is in the centre of the room. The walls are bare, except for a ceremonial African mask and an intricate…
Most of us grew up in an era of repression. Negative feelings were to be controlled, ignored or removed. It’s no wonder that we are the generation of Prozac. There is only so long that you can repress an emotion before it fights its way to the surface again. Drugs help us to repress without…
They’re emotionally and physically exhausting, they’re hugely expensive and they are the biggest curtailment of your personal freedom after prison: objectively, it makes next to no sense to have children. Sure, the instinctive drive to perpetuate the human species, blah-di-blah, but since it feels like the only conversation I’ve had with friends for the past…
I bristled again the other day at a phrase I think we need to expunge from our vocabularies. I was talking to an elderly relative about a mutual friend who’s recently been divorced and has three small children. “Ah,” said my relative, shaking her head disapprovingly. “Another broken home.” It’s a phrase that goes with…
There are going to be a lot of people getting rather cross about an article written by BBC journalist Jolyon Jenkins about Minecraft, children and parenting. Titled Should parents ever worry about Minecraft? it includes a number of questions about whether Minecraft is entirely healthy for kids, from addiction and lessening interest in the real…
The paediatrics unit of the Soshanguve community health centre north of Pretoria is bustling. The benches in the waiting area and outside the consultation rooms are filled with children and their mothers waiting to be seen by one of the nurses on duty. Happy Maifadi has come to see whether the results for her baby’s…
Breastfed babies are more likely to turn into well-educated and higher-earning adults, according to a major long-term study. Researchers in Brazil have followed nearly 6,000 babies from birth for the past three decades, enabling them for the first time to get an idea of the long-term effects of breastfeeding. Nearly 3,500 of them, now 30-year-old…
President Jacob Zuma suggests that teenaged mothers should be separated from their children and sent “far away” – to Robben Island or any island – in order to complete their education. In making this suggestion, Zuma asserts that teenagers are unfit to mother, that production and reproduction are incompatible and that young women should be…
Female firefighters working for the City of Cape Town say they are punished if they fall pregnant – they lose up to a quarter of their salaries because standby allowances are deducted during their pregnancies. But their male counterparts who are injured on the job do not lose their standby allowances. The City responded, saying…