Dog moms dominate: money talks more than biology ticks

I chose not to have children. It was a conscious decision made in my early thirties at the height of my journalism career. Not once did I consider the cost of raising a child. My reasons were more selfish, choosing work and travel and independence over family.

It’s a choice I’ve not regretted – until now. I watch wistfully as my girlfriends coo over their grandchildren, and am surprisingly sad when I hear about people dying “surrounded by family and loved ones”. That won’t be me.

I was unusual. Most of the young women I grew up with married early and became mothers. Motherhood, as I interpreted it, was bracketed within the ­cultural context of our community and the core pillar of the women’s identity.

Things were different for my baby boomer generation; everything was less prohibitively expensive than it now is. I bought my first house at 30, at the credit card price of R64,000. The fairly stable economy meant that my middle-class friends gave little thought to the cost of starting a family.

Times have changed. The population of South Korea, by way of example, has been shrinking since 2019, holding some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded anywhere, in peacetime or not. An indication of the shift? Pet strollers in South Korea account for 57% of all pram sales and baby strollers make up the remaining 43%.

There’s more. Pet food outsells baby formula and there are more veterinary hospitals than paediatric clinics.

Pooches rule

The age of preferred pet parenting is upon us. Somewhere in the past decade, having a baby became a risky financial decision and getting a dog became a sensible one. Quite surreptitiously, this phenomenon crept in through rent increases and stagnant salaries and the compounding maths of modern life, and now it’s a headline.

“Fertility crisis”. “Demographic winter”. “Depopulation”. The language is apocalyptic, and the instinct is to blame the individual. Like me, are they choosing freedom and independence over starting a family, along with factoring in the cost?

The global fertility rate for 2026 sits at roughly 2.2 births per woman, a hair above the replacement level of 2.1, the point at which a population simply maintains itself. The US is on track for a historic low of 1.53 births per woman this year. France, long held up as Europe’s fertility outlier, recorded more deaths than births in 2025 for the first time since World War 2.

China is now four years into population decline. Germany hasn’t had more births than deaths since 1972, a half-century of demographic contraction.

Everyone will tell you that Africa, with its steep projected population increase in the next four decades, is bucking the trend, but it is not entirely true. The birth rate is experiencing a slow but steady decline, and the continent’s fertility rate has been decreasing since the early 2000s, driven by improved socioeconomic conditions, better access to education and expanded ­family planning. Despite this, Africa still retains the highest birth rates globally.

Here at home, the fertility rate has fallen from 2.78 in 2008 to 2.21 children per woman now.

This story has been unfolding for two generations, across wildly different cultures, political systems and religions, all arriving at the same destination independently. When a pattern shows up simultaneously in Johannesburg, Seoul, Berlin, Rome and Santiago – Chile’s fertility rate is now just more than one birth per woman, among the lowest ever logged outside wartime – you are looking at a structural failing.

Now put the other number next to it. More American households have a pet than a child younger than 18. Ninety-four million US households own at least one pet, up from 82 million just three years ago. That’s not gradual drift; it’s a stampede.

Fifty-eight percent of millennials say, when asked directly, that they’d rather have a pet than a child. Eighty-one percent say they love their pet more than at least one member of their own family. Among Gen Z, the generation now old enough to be starting families and conspicuously not doing so, 70% own two or more pets.

Counting the costs

Here is the number that, for me, ends the debate about whether this is sentiment or economics: the average lifetime cost of raising a dog is about R600,000. Raising a child, adjusted for today’s costs, runs to roughly R3-million. That’s a deciding difference when you make a modest income.

A pet gives you companionship, routine, something warm to come home to, at about a sixth of the entry price. Of course people are doing the maths. I would too.

I have friends whose pets receive the same kind of care as any child: a dog sitter to keep their pet – who acts up when left alone – company. Some indulgent owners allow their dogs to slobber all over you, thinking it’s adorable. And, just like you can’t criticise people’s children, these days extend that to having to endure people’s pets.

It isn’t only the young and childless either. Baby boomers, entering the empty nest years with grown children who have moved out, moved on, or simply moved to another continent for work, are driving their own surge in pet ownership. Pets are stepping into a household role that adult children used to occupy.

The pet owner LSM

Dual-income, no-kids (dink!) couples have become one of the most valuable demographics in the entire pet economy, pouring disposable income into daycare, grooming and premium food for animals that will never ask them to fund a wedding or pay a deposit. This isn’t a single generation’s quirk. It’s a full-spectrum redesign of what a household looks like, top to bottom, and pets are the connective tissue running through all of it.

People, it seems, are not refusing to have children because they’ve lost some vital ancestral urge. They’re refusing because housing costs are more than their salaries, childcare in most rich countries costs more than university tuition, job security for anyone under 40 is precarious.

And, the sad fact is that about one in five people ­surveyed globally by the UN say fear about the future has caused them to have fewer children than they actually wanted.

So no, I don’t think the rise of the dog park and the decline of the maternity ward are two separate trends that happen to be occurring at the same time. Rather, people are opting into the version of love and responsibility that doesn’t bankrupt them.

Baby boomers built their future on the assumption of a financially secure retirement. Their grandchildren built spreadsheets instead, and the spreadsheet said: dog.

Sad? Perhaps. But true. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.