“A Child Needs Both a Mother and a Father”: the Parenting Constructions of a New Generation of Tertiary-Educated South African Prospective Parents

Quality of parenting plays a critical role in human development and well-being across the lifespan. Concurrently, the quality of parenting is underpinned by the dominant parenting ideas and practices that prevail in a specific socio-cultural context at a specific time. These ideas and practices may, therefore, vary over different social contexts, as well as over time. South Africa has a history of patriarchal family structures characterised by authoritarian parenting practises across its diverse population groups. Since the end of apartheid, however, South African society has been undergoing rapid changes that has impacted parenting structures and ideas. Currently, little is known about how these changes have affected contemporary young South Africans’ parenting constructions, specifically higher socio-economic groups that are more likely to take up contemporary ideas. To address this knowledge gap, this study adopted a feminist social constructionist framework and explored the parenting constructions of a group of tertiary-educated prospective parents. We conducted in-depth interviews with 21 postgraduate university students and used an inductive thematic analysis method to analyse the interview data. The results indicate that the prospective parents in this study adhered to authoritative parenting principles, distanced themselves from traditional gendered parent roles, and aspired to equal parenting roles in their own parenting. However, parallel to these signs of modern parenting ideas is the maintenance of traditional parenting notions such as innate differences between male and female parents, heterosexual parenting units as ideal for children, superiority and primacy of biological children, and associating parenthood with ultimate life fulfilment.