This essay approaches “parenting” as the caring interactions
between close adult kin and young people. The practices,
ideas and connections that comprise parenting evolve over
time because they are dependent on the well-being of parents, that
of adolescents and the health of the relationship between them.
In this essay, we explore these ideas with regard to the parenting
of adolescents under the particular conditions present in South
Africa.
Children who have received appropriate nutrition from
conception onwards, who are attached to their parents, and who
have received cognitive stimulation and warm, positive parenting
with consistent limit-setting, are more likely to succeed in their
education; are more likely to be healthy as adults; and less likely
to engage in risky sex, substance misuse and violent and criminal
behaviour. These are strands that run throughout the span of child
development, from conception to adulthood, but adolescence
entails new contexts for parenting as young people expand their
social networks, diversify their occupations and experience rapid
brain development that changes the way they think and engage
with the world.6
Positive relationships with role models, access
to social networks and to cultural capital become increasingly
important as young people tread the difficult path between their
aspirations and local realities. Shifts from earlier forms of parenting
may occur both in the activities of parenting and associated
expectations of both adults and their older children. However
the evidence suggests that parenting remains critical to young
people’s sense of belonging, constructions of their sexuality,their
interface with wider society and to their emotional and physical
safety.