Many of the adolescent boys in the study did not know their fathers and had grown up with little or no contact with them. The effect this had on their lives was a prevailing theme. In the interviews, they spoke about wanting to be ‘different’ fathers compared to their absent fathers and expressed the wish to be good role models to their children when they became parents one day. What was progressive was that the emphasis in their narratives about fatherhood was not only on fathers meeting the physical needs of their children, but meeting their emotional needs as well. It was evident that the boys had created an ‘ideal’ picture of themselves as wanting to be good fathers in the future.

During the fieldwork stage in 2009, three of the boys became fathers and so the interviews I conducted with these young men were also used to discuss how they experienced this.

Considerable research has been done on teenage pregnancy in South Africa, but most of it has focused only on teenage mothers. However, because of the circumstances that arose and the opportunity that presented itself to me, I was able to contribute to work that had already done in the field of reseach on teenage fathers by Sharlene Swartz and Arvin Bhana, as well as Robert Morrell, Deevia Bhana, Tamara Shefer and their colleagues. I was able to reflect the voices of Oupa, Timothy and Nelson, whose girlfriends became pregnant that year; in addition, as mine was a longitudinal study, I was also able to describe the experiences of some of the boys who became fathers later, when they were young adults.

Three adolescent boys, Oupa, Timothy and Nelson, while talking about their absent fathers (Chapter 4), also spoke about their own experiences of becoming teenage fathers. All three teenage fathers were actively involved in their children's lives, thus contradicting the dominant view that teenage fathers very seldom accept responsibility for supporting their children. None of the pregnancies were planned and the boys were shocked when they received the news from their respective girlfriends.