Co-Parenting: Mathematical and Indigenous Practices Dimensions in Kenya

Co-parenting is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in social sciences thought and Law. This essay challenges how the Co-parenting is typically understood in contemporary legal oriented society. We start by delineating different types of response—prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory—that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is co-parenting?” we then discuss assorted experiences reported by different single parents in Nairobi cosmopolitan: after rejecting “mathematical” and “conflictual” approaches, we outline a contextualized alternative grounded in indigenous practices. Co-parenting, on this (comprehensive) account, is best characterized as the sum of the arguments that have been classified indigenous co-parenting, and recognized as such by anthropologist, over time and space. We argue that the scope of the co-parenting expanded during the last decade of rapid urbanization in Kenya, such that if adapted it can become a constitutive ideology of the modern families. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of co-parenting would be a product of the ideological wars fought against “neo-liberalism” and assorted developments in enhancing livelihoods of family members. Today we both inherit and inhabit it. Key words: Indigenous, co-parenting practices, Single-Parent Families, Sustainable Livelihoods, Low-Income, Urban Beneficiaries