Blended Family: Stepparent-Stepchild Gender Variation and Its Influence on the Phenomenon of Children Living and Working on the Streets in South Africa

Children assign going to the street to mean various things such as being free from their parent’s maltreatment (e.g. typical mistreatment by stepparents), parent’s discipline, parent’s strict rules, etc. Blended families are emerging and growing at a fast rate in the contemporary society, because of the growing number of divorces, separation and unmarried parenthood. Therefore, there is conflicting evidence concerning whether children of various genders adapt to the arrival of a stepparent. It has also been found that children have more positive relationships with their biological parents, as compared to stepparents, and they normally have a biological parent of the same gender as the stepparent comes to their lives. Social practices of gender essentially thus affect relationships in stepfamily. The aim of this paper is to understand the Stepparent-stepchild gender variation and its influence on the phenomenon of children living and working on the streets in South Africa.

This paper draws from the qualitative data gathered from a Ph.D. study, making use of attachment theory. The findings consist of information collected from 15 street children receiving services at the two drop-in centres in the North-West Province of South Africa, and their parents making a total sample of 30 individuals. In-depth interviews were conducted in Setswana language and later transcribe in English. Data was manually coded, resulting themes and sub-themes were analysed thematically. Ethical approval was obtained from North-West University.

The results of the study revealed that children living and working on the streets come from various family structures. A proportion of such children were from complex stepfamilies, they provided various reasons for going to the street, such as the mistreatment of the stepparent of the opposite gender. This paper suggests that there should be policy interventions and programmes that strengthens various family structures that are transitioning.