“A Child Needs Both a Mother and a Father”: The Parenting Constructions of a New Generation of Tertiary-Educated South African Prospective Parents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".