‘Extraordinary survivors’ or ‘ordinary lives’? Embracing ‘everyday agency’ in social interventions with child-headed households in Zambia

Abstract

Child-headed households (CHHs), in which adults or guardians are either absent or not fully functioning in terms of providing for the material and emotional needs of children, have been largely explored through a coping strategies approach. These studies emphasise the ability of children and young people to exert agency in the face of adversity, typically casting them as extraordinary survivors. This perspective continues to drive social interventions with CHHs, which take less account of how children and young people themselves make sense of their daily lives. Drawing on ethnographic research with 11 CHHs in Zambia (2004–2008), this article theoretically extends notions of agency by moving beyond an approach which considers the agency of children and young people in CHHs as inherently connected with coping, resilience and competency. It introduces the concept of ‘everyday agency’, not to offer a new view of agency, but to convey a picture of daily life in CHHs from the vantage points of children and young people living in them, and considers the implications of this standpoint for social interventions.

Keywords:

• child-headed households
• agency
• social interventions
• coping strategies
• ‘everyday agency’

Notes

CHHs are commonly viewed within a larger category of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) which is generally used to refer to children who are orphaned or otherwise vulnerable due to AIDS (Meintjes and Giese 2006).

The term ‘double orphan’ refers to children who have lost both parents whilst ‘single orphan’ is used in situations where one parent is still living (UNICEF 2003).

Work by Foster (1997) and Foster et al. (1997a) in Zimbabwe are notable exceptions. Foster (1997, p. 4) defines a CHH as: ‘… one in which the caregiver responsible for the day-to-day supervision of younger children (including bathing children, dressing them, preparing meals, dealing with minor illnesses, etc) is under the age of 18 years but is not their biological mother or father. In some CHH, adults may be living in a CHH who for one reason or another (e.g. terminal illness, debility, mental incapacity) do not function as the caregiver’. The term ‘young carers’ is used to refer to children who undertake care-giving duties for other family members, such as parents or younger siblings (Bauman et al. 2006, Evans and Becker 2007, Robson and Ansell 2000).

In this article, I use the terms ‘Minority World and ‘Majority World’ (Punch 2000) to refer to the ‘First World’ or ‘Global North’ and the ‘Third World’ or ‘Global South’, respectively. These terms recognise ‘that people who live in the Minority World tend to experience more privileged lifestyles (access to more resources, higher standards of living etc) compared with the majority of the world's population’ (Punch 2000, p. 60).

Vulnerability is broadly understood as the state of being prone to harm or loss (Blaikie et al. 1994) and is associated with victimisation, insecurity, and risk (Delor and Hubert 2000). The concept has most readily been employed in the context of natural disasters but is increasingly prevalent in social science research, especially in the context of HIV and AIDS (Delor and Hubert 2000).

The concept of resilience has been increasingly employed within discussions of children's agency in an attempt to shift attention from vulnerability to understanding how young people negotiate risk situations (Evans 2005, James-Wilson 2007, Panter-Brick 2002, 2004).

See Bordonaro (2012) for a discussion of how agency among the so-called children at risk is only considered ‘full’ agency when children and young people's actions are aligned with morally and socially appropriate behaviour according to iconic notions of childhood.