Sunny SA!

Our country is a uniquely wonderful place to raise children. To celebrate Heritage Month in September, we celebrate what we love about our local parenting lifestyle.

- Kate Sidley

Crazy as it might sound, lock down brought home some of the benefits of South Africa as a place to raise young children. When we went from Level 5 to Level 4, and the exercise window was opened, I’ve never loved my city more. Yes, that’s Joburg – enough with the eye-rolling, you seaside dwellers – and it was gorgeous.

In the mild autumn mornings, the families hit the streets with their prams and their pushchairs and their bicycles and their over-enthusiastic dogs. Dads who would ordinarily be at work accompanied children, who would ordinarily be at playschool, through the suburbs, crunching through-plane tree leaves, the sun slanting brightly on the budding aloes and the red hot pokers. Moms jogged with prams or alongside wobbly little people on pushbikes. If you could overlook the masks, and didn’t know that a pandemic was prowling behind the scenes, you would have thought this an entirely blissful scene of healthy, happy young families.

Even with the masks and the knowledge of the pandemic, I thought how lucky we all were, amid the apocalyptic angst, to have the opportunity to walk outdoors, lightly clad, in the fresh air.

This being Heritage Month, it’s not a bad time to dwell on some of the positives of raising babies and toddlers in South Africa. It’s a difficult task, because we live in such a deeply unequal society, and the benefits and blessings that we think about when we think of our country and heritage are far from well distributed. With each good fortune, we bump up against our privilege, and against other families’ lack thereof – and it’s right that we acknowledge that.