There are a number of factors that contribute and create inequality to the ability and responsibility of care that caregivers’ face. This assignment paper will concentrate on the four main factors, namely; the historical background shaping family formation, gender patterns of provision of care, contemporary living arrangements and lastly state involvement in providing care. The historical background will look at Apartheid and how it has shaped families. With gender it will look at who is most likely to provide the care; mother or father. Contemporary living arrangements will look at the modern forms of living and the state involvement will look at where the government should come in when providing care and where it does come in when providing care.
Debbie Budlender and Francie Lund stated that, during the time of Apartheid the vision was to reserve the cities for the white population and the African population was to live in ‘separate homelands’ (Budlender & Lund, 2011).However the African workers that were allowed to stay in the cities and farms had to work for white owned interest and had to leave their wives and children behind in the homeland areas which caused fracturing families (Budlender & Lund, 2011).
Furthermore mining industries for most of the twentieth century gave men eleven month contracts where they were housed in single- sex compounds and only given four weeks a year to spend with their families this gave very little time for men to spend time with their children and the system led to the opportunity for extra- marital sex which resulted in the further disruption of families and mothers being forced to be the primary caregiver (Budlender & Lund, 2011).Statistics South Africa in Budlender & Francie, 2011, revealed that “men aged 15-64 years spent an average of three minutes a day of care while women the same age spend an average of