Love in a bag
We understand that you need to store your precious breastmilk for your baby to have it when you’re not around and to maintain your milk supply for when you’re together. This is important if you’re going back to work but want to continue nursing.
Family life in South Africa has never been simple to describe or easy to understand. When we speak of South African families, we hardly ever talk of only the nuclear family consisting of mom, dad and kids, but rather of extended families, as well as caregivers or guardians. This is because South Africa has a number of unique circumstances that affect what makes up the typical family unit. These factors include our history of apartheid and its migrant labour system, the effects of poverty and the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
According to a 2009 General Household Survey performed by UNICEF, only one in three South African children lived with both their biological parents. Even more telling, a whopping 61 percent of the children not living with either parent resided with their grandparents. Research by the Children’s Institute, an organisation that focuses on child policy and research in SA, shows that in 2011 there were more than one million orphans living in poverty with their relatives. These numbers are only expected to climb.
As a result, many grandparents are having to step into the shoes of their children and fulfil the role of primary caregiver, guardian, breadwinner and primary attachment figure to their grandchildren – to act as parent. That’s a lot of work, as we all know! Irrespective of this, grandparents in South Africa have never actually had any special legal status afforded to them, and they do not have any automatic rights in respect of their grandchildren such as those that a parent automatically has. What grandparents do have, however, is the ability to approach the High Court (who is deemed to be the “upperguardian” of all children in South Africa) in terms of the common law, in order to be granted specific rights in respect of their grandchildren.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND
With the advent of the Children’s Act 38 of 2005, this process has become easier and more definitive in that the Act makes provision for grandparents to make special application to any court for contact or care of their grandchildren, and to a High Court for guardianship of them. Sections of this Act provide for the assignment of care and contact of a child to any interested person (including a grandparent), while another section provides for the assignment of guardianship of a child to any interested person (including a grandparent).
However, the courts are very careful in enforcing any rights other than basic contact when the child’s parents are still present in the child’s life. The reason for this is that the courts believe the grandparents cannot be allowed to undermine the legal responsibilities and rights of a child’s parents if the parents are actually still able and willing to exercise those rights.
NO, YOU CAN’T SEE GRANNY!
But what if your grandchild’s parents refuse for you to see him/her? When it comes to determining whether to award contact of a child to a grandparent, the court will always consider whether it is in the best interests of