Forum user claims raising daughters is 'pagafantismo'

Raising a child for 20 years: the investment with no return

Imagine an asset requiring twenty years of uninterrupted contributions—food, healthcare, education, time—that yields nothing to the investor upon maturity. No financial product survives such a balance sheet. Yet it is contracted daily: it is called having a child. This logic has fueled a debate focusing on daughters, asking if fatherhood is the worst deal a man can take.

The premise is abrupt. Raising a daughter demands at least 18 years of dedication—bedtime stories, extracurriculars, meals, schooling—and this effort, according to this trend, ultimately benefits a third party who did not contribute. Proponents label this the ultimate pagafantismo. The uncomfortable conclusion trinc: the return on raising an independent adult woman accrues to someone else.

Why fatherhood is framed as a zero-return operation

Before accounting existed, calculation did. It is recalled that a well-raised daughter with good genes served to secure alliances with other families: connections, deals, and healthy lineage. In that scheme of arranged marriages, the benefit was mutual, as both sides gained a support network. According to this reading, the modern version leaves only one side standing: whoever raised the daughter provides the capital, while whoever partners with her collects the interest.

Another line of reasoning leads to the opposite ground. If one accepts the premise that raising a daughter benefits a stranger, they ask, without irony, where the next generation would come from if everyone decided to have only sons. This is where the argument begins to bite its own tail.

The rebuttal: educating is not investing

Here the conversation breaks. Against domestic accounting rises an argument from various fronts: a daughter is neither an asset to be handed over nor capital to be cultivated. Parenting means forming people so they can decide for themselves, and anyone measuring this process by yield probably never raised anyone.

The most repeated objection concerns language. Speaking of a daughter’s adult life in terms of profitability, critics warn, says more about the speaker than the daughter. A recurring critique targets the root problem: if an adult makes poor choices, the fault lies not in their gender, but in the education and example received at home. Children, it is insisted, learn not from what they are told, but from what they see. From this perspective, the solution is not avoiding daughters: it is raising them with judgment.

Why did romantic love enter the equation?

Because the issue drifted toward couple dynamics. Some interventions argue that behind all this lies a view of relationships reduced to transactions: if everything is explained by exchange, there is no room for stable affection. Some attribute this to prono’s effect on interpreting real relationships. The counter-response is that falling in love exists but is temporary, and partner choice trinc selection patterns.

The background: children cost, they don’t pay

Beyond the noise, several comments agree that raising a child is not an operation returning money, whether girl or boy. Some even claim life is harder for men—employment, precarity, conflicts. Regardless, no one in the debate presents parenting as an investment with returns: it is, they say, the nature of raising, done for reasons that do not fit in a spreadsheet.

What is actually gained by raising a child?

What remains is the unmeasurable. Bond, continuity, transcendence. This is the argument closing many responses and the hardest to refute with numbers: family does not function like a portfolio, and comparing it to an investment is a category error. No one expects interest from a friend.

If profitability were the criterion, no upbringing would break even. The question, then, is not whether having a daughter is a good business, but why part of a generation insists on measuring it as if it were.