Maverick Life

Intergenerational influences

‘Birth to Thirty’ – a study of the children born in 1990, the first to grow up in a free and democratic South Africa

‘Birth to Thirty’ – a study of the children born in 1990, the first to grow up in a free and democratic South Africa
Birth to Thirty book cover. Image: supplied

The largest longitudinal study of its kind on the continent, ‘Birth to Thirty’, has tracked the lives of a select group born in 1990, and now some of the findings have been published in a book by one of the study’s founders. Maverick Life caught up with the author.

Just more than three decades since the dismantling of apartheid, the findings of a longitudinal study that began in 1990, with about 3,200 babies born between 23 April and 8 June 1990, the largest and longest of its kind in Africa, have been published in a new book, launched August 2022, titled Birth to Thirty: A Study as Ambitious as the Country We Wanted to Create. 

The author, Linda Richter – a developmental psychologist, a distinguished professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre of Excellence in Human Development, and the recipient of the 2015 South African Medical Research Council President’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Research Excellence, as well as the 2020 National Research Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award – was one of the founding members of the study, having joined the team in 1989 during the preparatory stage. 

Professor Noel Cameron, then in the Anatomy Department at Wits, and Dr Derek Yach, then at the Medical Research Council, had conceptualised it as a 10-year epidemiological study, focused on health and disease. The duo had different objectives, says Richter: Cameron wanted to study child growth longitudinally, while Yach, in anticipation of major demographic shifts that would come with the end of apartheid, including rapid migration into towns and cities that had until then served the minority white population, and were ill-prepared to properly provide for the country’s majority black population, wanted to study the effects of rapid urbanisation on the health of children and their families. Yach also brought in Richter as the “child development” person.

In addition to the birthdate window, additional parameters were that the cohort had to be made up of singleton babies, born in public hospitals in what was then the Soweto, Johannesburg municipal boundaries, which excluded Randburg at that time. These geographic parameters and other changes that would follow within the country’s population would have implications for the study’s demographic representation. 

“The small proportion of white children born during the six-week enrolment period in 1990, 678 in total, dwindled over time – as white people dropped from 12% to 8% of the South African population, moved to other cities and countries, and their isolation behind high walls blocked our attempts to make contact. By the time we reached the 28-year data collection point, Birth to Thirty had become largely a study of people who were ‘not white’. That meant we had a constrained range of socioeconomic variation without the top end of wealth, and thus many of our results underestimate the impact of poverty and hardship,” explains Richter.

The findings: On violence

From the initial 3,200, the number of participants who are still part of the study has gone down to just under 2,000. The cohort is now 32 years old; and more than 270 papers based on the study have been published to date, with more than 20 million raw data points on close to 2,000 individuals over 22 data collection waves between birth and adulthood collected, all of which from whom data has been collected up until 28 years of age, Richter explains. In her book, she covers some of the study’s major findings under five headings: violence, learning and education, growth and health, mental and social well-being, and social engagement. 

 “Violence and cruelty are endemic in South Africa, associated with, among others, the structural violence of apartheid, political violence, collective violent resistance, the ongoing violent struggles for power and resources, criminal violence, xenophobic violence and interpersonal violence,” she told her audience while introducing the book at its launch at Wits University on 19 August.

By the age of 18, only 1% of the participants hadn’t witnessed or experienced some form of violence, and about 50% experienced or witnessed violence at school, at home and in their community. Sexual violence in particular was spread across age and gender. By the age of 28, a third of both women and men reported that they physically abused and had been abused in their relationships. 

“That was a surprise for me, because I wasn’t intending to study violence to the extent that we did, but violence is so pervasive in our communities,” says Richter. She emphasises that the level of violence shifts with different age groups, with children likely to start hitting other children between the ages of two and four, before they are properly socialised. As parents and family intervene, the level of violence declines until high school, where it dramatically rises.

In her examination of the ecological environment, Richter posits that many of the children attend primary schools quite close to home, with people who live next door or over the road, so children go in a friendship group. However, come high school, which also coincides with puberty, many have to travel longer distances, and are exposed to many more environmental factors, including societal violence.

“Another intriguing psychological issue was that we found that when looking back on their lives retrospectively, people reported lower levels of violence. Some might have reported being bullied at school, and violence at home earlier on. When we asked them to reflect on the past [as adults], many didn’t mention these things. When we started looking for explanations, we found that if people’s lives had turned out well, they tended to minimise past problems, whereas if their lives were turning out less well, they tended to maximise,” says Richter. 

Growth, cognitive capacity and mental health 

Growth, cognitive capacity and mental health were found to be closely related to the physical and social potential bestowed on the children by their parents and the circumstances in which their parents lived. “In turn, their parents were born with the potential that their own parents and their circumstances bestowed on them, and the Bt30 cohort are passing these intergenerational influences on to their own children. In each generation this potential can be boosted (or dampened) by changes in socioeconomic circumstances, better access to quality services and opportunities that families provide for their children,” says Richter.

Women study participants were found to be, on average, a centimetre taller than their mothers. While only a quarter of their mothers had passed matric, more than half of the women in the cohort had done so, and most lived in houses with consumer goods such as a car, a refrigerator and a washing machine. On the downside, more Bt30 women than their mothers had their first pregnancy before the age of 18, more Bt30 women than their mothers smoked and drank alcohol, felt overwhelmed by debt, and reported intimate partner violence and depression.

Richter notes that the study is not necessarily an accurate reflection of this age group across the country. “It’s hard to talk about how the country is doing because Soweto does quite differently from the rest of the country. Firstly, it’s in Johannesburg, a city, it’s highly developed and very urban. It’s also a highly concentrated population. There are all sorts of variations of language, which communicate a kind of cultural understanding of what’s going on. But what really is strong, which parallels the development of the group, is the incredible sense of freedom that they have. Even though they might be unemployed, or they might not have finished their schooling, many of the young people that I spoke to personally had the sense that the world is full of possibilities for them, and in a way that wasn’t the case with their parents.” 

That said, she adds that this does not apply to everyone. A few days before she was to interview one of the participants who had left school at 15, his mother contacted the study to let them know that he had just been sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment for hijacking and murder. 

“So, by no means did all of the people in the study turn out well. A lot of people turned out really poorly, and their circumstances are so constrained. For example, one woman actually wrote and passed her matric, but could never afford to go to Pretoria to get a copy of her matric certificate; so she was just stuck,” says Richter.

Among other findings were that, compared with when the study began, where there was a sense that there could be a drug problem in the environment, drugs had become a much bigger feature. “Drugs in the suburban area increased at an incredible rate. Almost every participant spoke of their own experience with drugs, or experiences of their friends with drugs. At the start of the study in 1990, in the formerly coloured areas of the city, there was a sense that there were drug problems. But now, everybody is conscious of [drug problems]. Some people speak about the worries of their own children, because now we’ve got a third generation of children born to this cohort,” says Richter. 

Surprisingly to Richter, she also found the participants to be largely disconnected from the news and broader political debates. There was also much less participation in formal groups, such as choirs and community groups, compared with their parents. “There were more informal friendship circles; Twitter friends and Instagram followers. So it’;s a different kind of affiliation,” says Richter. 

Reflecting on some of the above findings during the book’s launch, Richter told the audience: “Experiences and exposures in early childhood, and intergenerationally, create footpaths to adult health and human capital. However, these effects are not fixed; there is substantial room for individual trajectories to be changed under altered conditions. While South Africa has changed, it has not yet changed enough, or changed in the right direction, for all young people to reach their full human potential, free of the constraints of generations of poverty and adversity.”

Birth to Forty?

“I have long felt a responsibility to tell the story of Bt30. Mainly because I am the only person among the group that started the study in 1989 who is still actively involved in the project. Also because, for me, many of the staff, and the participants and their families, Bt30 was always ‘more than a study’. I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to contribute to and be part of Birth to Thirty. It is one of the big achievements of my career,” says Richter.

To get to where it is, the study faced many challenges, not the least of which has been funding. And it is with thanks to the numerous funders that they have been able to continue. “We started with 3,200 children, that’s a lot of children to do physical exams and psychological tests on. We were constantly needing money, space, vehicles and other resources. But we made it through that time, it was a bit of a struggle,” she says, adding that it was only in the ninth year of the study, after surmounting various challenges and securing additional funding, that they could begin to consider extending it to 20 years. 

“We have every intention of going to 40 years – I won’t go with them to 40 years, but my colleagues will,” says Richter, who is now 72. She adds: “Longitudinal studies are incredibly expensive and incredibly complicated. Many of them run out of funding just as they get to the point where they see results. It’s in the fifties and the sixties where you start to see the impact of the burden of health. Many people stay relatively healthy until their late thirties and forties. And it’s after that where the mental health issues, relationship stability, work, all of that begins… that’s the life you’ve now got. Lots of studies run out of money before they get to that point. So we’re really hoping to be able to continue.” DM/ML 

Birth to Thirty is available to order online on Amazon and Smashwords.


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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Dennis Bailey says:

    Well done, Linda, a study of this kind and quality is gold to a failing state. Thank you. Quite literally the work of a lifetime. I hope it gets the attention it deserves. I’ve ordered the book.

  • John Strydom says:

    A remarkable piece of work. And it is encouraging to know that these people in their 30’s, even if unemployed, still have a sense of a good future awaiting them. May their dreams be realised.

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