A Mzansi Reckoning.
Any regrets?
What would you do differently if you were born again and remembered all your past lives?
He thought about it. Nodded. Smiled.
Kids. Kids. Babies.
Zero kids. Zero babies.
A vasectomy the day the balls dropped properly. Permanent sterilisation, young, no regrets.
Why? the interviewer asked.
Because it’s a scam, he said. Kids are a compounding expense and a compounding liability, the eighth wonder of the world, running in reverse. It doesn’t stop until you die. They cling to you, and they suck you dry.
Not everyone is meant to have kids. A child is not a badge you pin on your chest to prove you’re a man or a woman. Fuck that!.
Kids are making kids in this country. Kids are being set up to fail before they can walk. Born poor and still poor at sixteen, you have a 60% chance of dying poor. Still poor past twenty-five, that number climbs above 90%. Born poor, die poor. The odds are rigged before the child draws its first breath. So why bring one into the mess?
That’s the gut version. Here’s the argument, built out properly, both sides of it, no political correctness, no soft landing. Read it all before you decide which one you actually believe.
THE CASE AGAINST: KIDS AS COMPOUNDING LIABILITY
The Maths Doesn’t Lie.
Old Mutual and Standard Bank put the cost of raising one child in a middle-income household, birth to eighteen, at R1.6 million to R2.5 million, before a single rand of university fees. Add private schooling, where Hippo Insurance data shows fees exceeding R125,000 a year, and the true lifetime bill climbs past R3.5 million. Now run the opportunity cost: route that same R2 million into equities over eighteen years instead, and you’re not raising a dependent, you’re building a fortune. Childlessness isn’t a sacrifice. It’s a wealth strategy wearing a disguise.
Born Poor, Die Poor.
This isn’t a slogan, it’s econometrics.
UNU-WIDER’s SA-TIED research puts South Africa’s intergenerational income elasticity at 0.55 to 0.62. Translation: more than half of a parent’s economic position transfers directly onto the child, before the child has done anything to earn or deserve it. Sixty-two percent of South African children live in multidimensional poverty, no reliable food, water, sanitation, or healthcare, per UNICEF and Stats SA. The Child Support Grant sits at R580 a month; PMBEJD puts the real cost of feeding a child nutritiously at R977. The state is short by 41%, and it makes up the difference in stunted growth. Layer in youth unemployment sitting at 50 to 60%, and you’re not just gambling with your own money. You’re gambling with a person who never got a vote.
The Body Pays First.
Before the economics, there’s the body. Pregnancy is not an inconvenience with a guaranteed happy ending, it’s a medical event with permanent line items: pelvic floor dysfunction, diastasis recti, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes that quietly rewires a woman’s lifetime diabetes risk. The Perinatal Mental Health Project found that over 30% of South African women experience perinatal depression or anxiety, double the global rate. And it can be fatal: the 2025 Saving Mothers Report puts South Africa’s maternal mortality ratio at 111.7 per 100,000 live births, most of it haemorrhage and hypertension. This is not a footnote. This is the opening bid.
You’re Not Raising A Child, You’re Feeding The Fiscus.
Every state needs a tax base, and yours is it. You absorb 100% of the cost of raising a taxpayer. If that child succeeds, SARS takes up to 45% of what they earn in PAYE, plus 15% VAT on whatever’s left. You fund the investment. The state collects the dividend, then hands you back potholes and load-shedding.
Family Tax, Twice Over.
Then there’s Family Tax, the obligation to carry your parents because the state never built them a pension, while also carrying whatever child you bring into the world. A kid doesn’t just split your money two ways. It splits it three: backward to your parents, sideways to yourself, forward to a dependent who didn’t ask to be born into any of it. Opt out, and the cycle stops with you.
Consent Nobody Asked For.
Strip away the spreadsheets and you’re left with the oldest objection: a child cannot consent to existing. You are handing an entire life, trauma, illness, crime, a warming, drying country, to someone who never got a say. With Gauteng and the Eastern Cape already staring down collapsing water infrastructure, that’s not a small thing to hand someone without asking first.
The Happiness Data, Closes The Case.
This is where the sociology stops being soft. A major meta-analysis on parenthood and marital satisfaction found only 38% of mothers with infants report high marital satisfaction, against 62% of childless women. The Max Planck Institute’s longitudinal tracking shows life satisfaction spikes right before birth, then crashes below the pre-child baseline and a third child adds nothing; it trends negative. Up to 90% of couples report declining relationship satisfaction after their first child, per research synthesised by the NBER, and mothers rate the daily grind of parenting as less enjoyable than watching television or doing the shopping.
The R360,000 Rule:
Cross-national research shows children only correlate with more happiness once GDP per capita clears roughly R360,000 a year, backed by state-funded childcare and paid parental leave. South Africa isn’t there. Here, the deficit is raw and unbuffered, singles win on happiness, mood, sleep, and cortisol; parents win, later, on meaning, if at all.
THE CASE FOR: KIDS AS GENERATIONAL INVESTMENT
Education Is Still The Lever That Moves The Poverty Trap.
The pessimism above is real, but it isn’t the whole picture. Stats SA shows over 45% of young South Africans aged 20 to 34 finish secondary school, against just 17.9% of their parents’ generation and nearly 70% of those who finish are the first in their family to do so. Education alone accounts for roughly 40% of intergenerational earnings mobility. A strategic, well-resourced upbringing remains one of the few levers strong enough to break a lineage out of poverty in a single generation.
A Child Is A Diversified Asset, Not Just A Drain.
Where the anti-natalist sees a liability, the long game sees a hedge. In a country where the state pension is fragile and public health is buckling, a well-raised, high-skilled adult child is a private social safety net that money alone can’t buy, healthcare advocacy, financial cushioning, and physical security for you when you’re old, delivered by someone who actually knows and loves you.
The Country Needs The Demographic Dividend.
South Africa’s brain drain and skills shortage are structural threats. A society doesn’t fix itself with empty offices; it fixes itself with capable people. Every child raised with critical thinking, economic literacy, and real values is a direct contribution to the pipeline of entrepreneurs, engineers, and problem-solvers this country is short of. Declining fertility elsewhere has already produced labour shortages and shrinking tax bases, the demographic dividend is a real asset, not a fairytale.
The Unbroken Chain.
Every ancestor you have, through plagues, wars, famine, colonisation, apartheid, reproduced. That’s the only reason you exist to read this. Having a child continues a chain that has run unbroken for millions of years. It’s the only form of continuity a mortal being actually gets: your language, your values, your family’s story, carried into a future you will never personally see.
The Forcing Function Nobody Talks About.
There’s a psychological upgrade too. Behavioural science shows a dependent shifts a parent’s risk tolerance and drive, for a lot of men and women, a child becomes the forcing mechanism that ends complacency: earn more, build the business, get disciplined. Sustained parenting also produces oxytocin and dopamine that buffer against midlife isolation, and the research on ageing shows adults with strong family ties maintain sharper cognition and lower dementia rates, purely from the ongoing social engagement.
Ubuntu Is Not A Slogan, It’s A Support System.
Umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. Having children instantly plugs you into schools, sports clubs, neighbourhoods, parent networks, the dense social fabric a life built purely on personal autonomy rarely generates on its own. It also strips the ego in a way almost nothing else does: caring for a being who can do absolutely nothing for himself teaches a patience and empathy no book can give you.
THE MATRIX
Strip away the paragraphs and here’s the whole argument, side by side.
The Case For
Money
+ Eliminates a R2.5m+ liability; capital compounds freely.
+ Builds a diversified, multi-generational human-capital asset.
The Body
+ Protects against real, sometimes fatal, medical risk.
+ Triggers neurochemical drive, purpose, and longevity.
The State
+ Actively raises the skilled citizens the country is short of.
The Case Against
The Odds
– Refuses to expose a new life to a 62% poverty risk.
– Refuses to breed an unpaid taxpayer for a state that under-delivers.
The Existential
– Zero regret, full autonomy, no consent violated.
– Ancestral continuity, legacy, deep communal meaning.
YOU DECIDE
One path protects your body, your bank balance, and your freedom, in a country that makes all three expensive. The other path is a bet, on a child, on the country, on the idea that raising someone properly still counts for something inside a system built to extract from both of you.
Both arguments are airtight on their own terms. The maths supports one. The meaning supports the other. Ubuntu might tell you they were never actually opposed to begin with. Only you know which one you can live with when you’re old and looking back.
You Decide.
=================
Dr. Mzamo Masito.
Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.
Leave a Reply