Aug-Sept 2014 K.indd

36

AUG/SEPT 2014 • www.cosatu.org.za

PATERNITY LEAVE can be good for children, men and women

L ast Monday, two newspaper posters af fi xed to Media House on St George’s Mall in downtown Cape Town drew attention to two disparate strands of a a long overdue conversation about fathers and their role in the family. One poster announced “Dads Want More Paternity Leave”. The other headline read “SA’s Child Support Shame”. Laid out starkly on the wall was a conundrum. One poster drew attention to a petition being circulated by a new father calling for ten days paid paternity leave to allow fathers to be more involved in the lives of their children and to share the work of raising them. The other reminded us that far too many fathers are not making suf fi cient effort to support their children or their children’s mothers and fail to even pay the minimal child support required of them. Lots of research tells us that the presence of a caring, non-violent and supportive father is good for children and for their mothers and that it reduces a range of social problems. Men who are active and involved fathers also bene fi t: they’re less likely to drink, to fi ght, and they’re more likely to report being happy and well.

of child support, or maintenance, as we sometimes call it. Sadly, in South Africa that’s all too often not something single mothers can predictably expect. The story on child support highlighted the large number of men who choose not to pay child support and it details the many ways in which maintenance courts fail to hold them to account. Sonke’s 2010 research showed that there are woefully few maintenance of fi cers and not nearly suf fi cient capacity in the maintenance courts to compel fathers to pay maintenance. Our government needs to allocate the resources required to ensure that fathers follow through on their obligations to their children and the mothers of their children. If so many men are suf fi ciently disengaged that they abandon their children fi nancially, is there reason to consider paternity leave? In a word, yes. In South Africa, currently parenting leave is available for women but not for men. Women are granted four months maternity leave whereas men receive only three days of what is called family responsibility leave. Unmistakably this parental leave arrangement sends two equally problematic messages: one that it’s a women’s job to take care of children and the other that men can’t

How do we accomplish this and how do paternity leave and child support help us increase equitable, non-violent care giving by men? First, a bit of background on who does what in the family and how our laws or their lack of implementation can disadvantage both women and men: A 2013 survey by Stats SA tells us that women do more than twice as much care work as men do in the home. Women spend 3 hours 15 minutes per day on household activities whereas men spend only 1 hours 28 minutes on the same activities. When someone in the house falls ill or is sick, the discrepancy becomes much larger: Women spend nearly eight times more of their time caring for the sick than men do. That’s obviously unfair to women and it can serve as a barrier to women’s full participation in the labour market. When women raise children by themselves, their share of care work increases dramatically. If single mothers can’t count on the fathers of their children to participate in household work they should be able to count on the fathers for regular payment

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