Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Development Theory and Policy, School of Economics and Business Science, University of the Witwatersrand, June 2017 / South Africa has uniquely high rates of parental absence from children’s lives. Apartheid-era restrictions on population movement and residential arrangements contributed to family fragmentation, particularly when adults – mainly men – migrated to work in cities and on the mines. Despite the removal of legal impediments to permanent urban settlement and family coresidence for Africans, patterns of internal and oscillating labour migration have endured, dual or stretched households continue to link urban and rural nodes, and children have remained less urbanised than adults. Importantly for children, migration rates among prime-age women have increased, alongside falling marriage rates, declining remittances and persistently high unemployment. Households, and women especially, may have to make difficult choices about how to manage the competing demands of child care and income generation. It is the mobility patterns and household configurations arising from these strategies that are the focus of this research.
The thesis uses a mixed-method approach to explore children’s geographic mobility and care arrangements. Using micro data spanning two decades, it traces children’s co-residence arrangements with parents and describes changes in household form from the perspective of children. It maps recent patterns of child migration within South Africa using four waves of a national panel study and compares these with patterns of maternal migration to reveal various dynamics of migration in mother–child dyads: co-migration, sequential migration, independent migration, and immobility. The child-focused analysis augments the existing migration literature, which has tended to focus on adult labour migration and ignore children or regard them as appendages of migrants. A single, detailed case study spanning three generations of mothers adds texture to the analysis by demonstrating the complexity of household strategies and plans for child care in the context of female labour migration. This in turn helps to reflect on the value of micro data for describing and analysing household form and migration patterns, particularly among children. / XL2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/24138 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Hall, Katharine Jane |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (244 leaves), application/pdf |
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