Though an estimated 70% of South Africa’s children grow up in single-parent households (Bundlender and Lund, 2011) there is very limited research that focuses on parent resiliency in this type of family unit. Parent support and involvement continue to be informed by homogenising discourses that perpetuate heterosexual, middle class two-parent teams managing the family unit, and position men as central to such processes. When research on women-headed households are conceptualised, it is from a deficit perspective that characterises the family unit as a broken, incomplete family unit, and educationally disadvantaged (Gagnon, 2016; 2018; Hampden-Thompson, 2009; Hampden-Thompson & Galindo, 2015; Knowles & Holmström, 2013; Murry & Brody, 1999; Musick & Meier, 2010). Consequentially the studies are framed by a discourse that presume that children growing up in single-mother homes are at a higher risk of growing up in poverty stricken homes, and that they will have lower educational and vocational aspirations (Hampden-Thompson, 2009; Murry & Brody, 1999; Musick & Meier, 2010). Such research presume that single-parent families are at higher risk of experiencing stress and difficulty (Knowles & Holmström, 2013), and is more likely to portray the parent as less involved in their children’s schooling due to time, financial and social pressures. Our review of the literature shows that many empirical inquiries support this characterisation, which perpetuates the negative perception of single-mother families.

As women and critical scholars, we consider this portrayal of the single parent household as “broken, dysfunctional, incomplete, inadequate and inferior contexts when compared to married, two-parent, heterosexual families” (Gagnon, 2016, p. 20), to be the demonising of women-headed family unit. Our feminist standpoint is that the agency and resiliency that single mothers as heads of households bring to home contexts stay misrecognised in educational research on learner success (Ropers-Huilman & Winters, 2011, p. 671). Our study is situated within South African community where single-mother parenting is the norm. Though a plethora of research exists about absent fathers in South African homes (Holborn & Eddy, 2011; Mavunga, Boor, & Mphaka, 2013; Richter & Morrell, 2006; Okeke, 2018), research on mothers’ role in family building and support seldom is limited and narrowly focussed. Our article sets out to broaden the research framing of parent support by breaking with a discourse that centres two-parent households as the norm. We reclaim single-mother families’ place at the centre of mainstream society, and follows a decolonial, feminist research agenda (Kessi & Boonzaaier, 2018; Kiguwa, 2007; Mestry & Schmidt, 2012; Ropers-Huilman & Winters, 2011; Mama, 2011; Olesen, 2011).

The study’s context is a low SES community where most of the residents live in informal housing and experience socio-economic challenges. This racially homogenous community is the result of separatist development as South Africa’s racial laws authorized its citizens to live in racially demarcated communities (SAIRR, 1993/1994). During the apartheid era the government demarcated this area as a traditionally ‘coloured’ township. The researchers share the same ethnicity, socio-economic background and gender as the participant community. The research was conceptualised within a social constructivist paradigm, as the purpose of the research was to advance knowledge about the mothers’ subjective meaning making of their real-world challenges (Terre Blanche, Durrheim, & Painter, 2006). In an overwhelmingly patriarchal South African society, women are often stripped of their agency in the stories that are told about them. As black women we recognize the influences that the intersection of gender, race and class have on poor women’s life experiences. As such, we are always mindful about how inequality, discrimination and marginalization shape poor women’s life experiences. This qualitative inquiry was a multiple case study (Merriam, 2009; Yin, 2003) with the bounded system being the single-mother family unit. Our selection of participants was motivated by their possession of rich data on single motherhood and educational support and their potential to be “good sources of information” (Patton, 2002, p. 51). The unit of analysis was the stories of parents’ educational support to their adolescent high school child. The primary question guiding this research was: What are the stories of educational support to adolescent students in single-mother families? Though they live in the same community, each mother’s story about parent support is unique to her life journey (Rule & John, 2011). We negotiated access to their home environments and conducted semi-structured individual interviews with the parents, their adolescent school children and key informants. We also held a focus group session with strategic role players. These data collecting methods gave us creative flexibility to gain intimate knowledge of the participants’ living situations, their experiences, their interactions with education and the schooling of their children.

For our analysis of the data we made use of Critical race theory and Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth theory to inform our findings. Being a single parent raising a family seems to be a daunting task on many different levels for these mothers. Society would want us to believe that single mothers do not have a road map to educational success for their high school children because of their history of interrupted schooling. In our interviews with the mothers, we gained insight into how their own interrupted schooling shaped their views of education and the importance of their children’s education. We equate their inspirational stories with Yosso’s (2005) aspirational capital, which is capital that seeks to “maintain hopes and dreams for the future … and nurture a culture of possibility” (Yosso, 2005, p. 78). We found that the mothers used their own stories to inspire their children to value education and to work hard to reap the benefits that could come from education. As South African mothers they were navigating a world in which the histories and legacies of racialised oppression is still being felt in their poor, racially allocated, township. However, amidst daily adversity caused by poverty, unemployment and living in unsafe communities, the participants found ways in which to be resourceful. They were resisting the repeat of their own histories in their children’s lives. The data contained many examples of familial, aspirational, social and navigational capital that mothers facilitate and that their families benefit from, when viewed through the CCW lens. These single mothers used various resources to support their adolescent children’s education, findings that show that the mothers are involved parents who are engaging with education as an investment in their children’s futures.

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