‘Skip generation households’: Covid-19’s unseen victims

The Covid-19 pandemic has been particularly ravaging to the aged, taking away grandparents who play a central role in raising grandchildren, many a time the only guardians, particular in poor communities.

According to SA Medical Research Council, since 3 May last year, there have been about 85 000 deaths of people over the age of 60, mostly as a result of Covid-19.

These are grandparents who look after and take care of the grandchildren while their parents are out working. In many cases, grandparents are not only breadwinners with their pension grants, but are also the only person or social support structure the children have in the absence of parents for a variety of reasons, including death.

“Bear in mind that based on Statistics SA figures on older persons and households, one in five households in SA is headed by an older person. So that is the current potential impact you are looking at,” said Lisa Vetten, researcher and project consultant in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg.

She said grandparents were what they call “skip generation households”, where parents will be working elsewhere and the children will be living with those grandparents.

According to Vetten, this support structure made migrant labour possible as it allowed mothers to work elsewhere. She said if the grandmothers die, this has an impact on their daughters and their children because they will no longer be able to work and they will have to look after their child.

“Their option is either to give up working to look after the children or bring the child to live with them. This has long-term consequences and becomes a disruption of stability in the child’s life,” said Vetten.

She said this also uprooted children to a new place, where they will have to make new friends and adapt to new surroundings.

“On top of the loss and grief, grandparents are also breadwinners because they are getting pensions. For many people, that pension is what stands between them and poverty,” Vetten added.

Brenda Mdluli, a community care worker in Machiding village in Mpumalanga, said there were many elderly-headed households where children were now living alone because their grandparents had died from Covid-19.

“It is a sad situation because in many cases we battle to get other family members to take in the children. In rural areas, grandparents are the pillars of communities while the young work in the urban areas. Covid-19 has smashed that foundation,” she said.

Mdluli said the lasting impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on social support structures, particularly for children, will have devastating consequences.

“With no one to look after them and show them what is wrong and right, the future of these children looks bleak,” she said.

In August last year, SA Police Service crime statistics showed that a staggering 779 of the 21 325 murders recorded by police in between April 2019 and March 2020 were committed by children between the ages of 10 and 17.

siphom@citizen.co.za

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