Black tax: The fine line between helping and enabling

Wanting to help the people you love is not a flaw. In many South African families, it is woven into how we understand loyalty, ubuntu and what it means to have “made it”. That core value is not the problem.

The problem arises when helping quietly becomes something else − when your support stops being a bridge and becomes a permanent residence. That shift is called enabling. Unlike healthy helping, enabling doesn’t move people forward. It keeps them exactly where they are: comfortable, dependent and insulated from the discomfort that would push them to grow.

This article isn’t about withdrawing love. It is about giving love and support wisely and with intentionality. The hardest truth about enabling is this: it costs you everything, and it gives the other person nothing of lasting value.

Five signs you are enabling and creating dependency:

Sign 1: Helping the same person with the same problem for years

This is the clearest signal, and the one most people talk themselves out of noticing. If your support was genuinely helping, the situation would have shifted through new skills, different decisions or smaller requests.

When nothing has changed year after year, your help isn’t solving the actual problem. It is managing a situation that has no reason to resolve because you have removed the urgency to do so.

This is not a character verdict on the person you are helping. Many people are not consciously choosing dependency; they have simply adapted to a system that works for them because you keep making it work.

What you can do about it:

• Shift to time-bound support by saying, “I can help for the next two months while you put a plan in place.”
• Link your support to visible effort by asking what they are actively doing to change the situation.
• Acknowledge the pattern with care by stating, “I have noticed we keep coming back to this, and I want to help in a way that can move things forward.”

Sign 2: You are their first call instead of their last resort

A safety net catches people when everything else has failed. If you are Plan A, it means they haven’t tried anything else first because they don’t need to − you are already there. When you become the first call, you quietly replace someone’s own problem-solving skills.

Over time, this takes a toll on their confidence, their resourcefulness and both of your bank balances. People build capability by solving problems. When you consistently solve problems on their behalf, you remove the opportunity for that growth, and your well-intentioned generosity quietly shrinks what the people you love believe they are capable of.

What you can do about it:

• Before responding to any request, ask, "What have you already tried?"
• Redirect before you rescue if they haven't made any effort to solve the issue themselves.
• Sit with the discomfort if your question causes offence, as this reveals how deeply the dynamic has been normalised.

Sign 3: You feel resentment more than generosity

Your emotions are data. When giving starts to feel like an obligation − when you send money and feel hollow rather than fulfilled − something has clearly shifted. You are no longer choosing to give.

Instead, you are complying to avoid conflict, guilt or being labelled as “selfish”. Buried resentment doesn’t disappear. It accumulates, leaks into your relationships and eventually poisons the very love you were trying to express through giving.

What you can do about it:

• Listen to your resentment instead of pathologising it, as it tells you a boundary has been crossed.
• Name the feeling privately by asking yourself what your resentment is trying to teach you.
• Distinguish guilt from wrongdoing, remembering that feeling guilty doesn’t mean you have done something wrong.
• Use resentment as a compass pointing toward where a boundary is needed, not where love has run out.

Sign 4: You believe they cannot cope without you

This belief feels like love but holding it about another adult is one of the most disempowering things you can do. When you believe someone cannot survive without your help, you make yourself indispensable and render them incapable.

When the person you are helping also comes to believe it, you are no longer in a helping relationship. You are in a dependency system dressed in the language of care. This is where self-leadership and Black Tax intersect most directly. What looks like care can quietly function as control, keeping someone tethered to a version of themselves that requires rescuing.

What you can do about it:

• Ask yourself honestly what would happen if you didn’t help this time.
• Recognise that they might be uncomfortable, but they will not be destroyed.
• Remember that you can love someone fully while still believing in their capacity to manage their own life.

Sign 5: You do more to justify their patterns than they do to change them

Pay attention to the story you tell yourself. You might be working hard to constantly explain − to yourself or others − why this situation is different, why it is not really a pattern, or why they still need your help.

Notice when you start doing mental gymnastics on someone else’s behalf to explain away unfortunate circumstances while they do very little to change things. When your internal monologue about their life is more active than their own effort to change it, you have started carrying their cognitive burden alongside their financial expenses.

What you can do about it:

• Ask yourself if you are seeing the situation clearly or making excuses so you can keep saying yes.
• Consider what advice you would give if a friend described this exact situation to you.

The true cost of enabling (to the other person)

We often talk about the cost to the giver: the financial strain, the resentment and the burnout. But enabling has a cost to the person being enabled that is just as real.

Every time you step in before they sit with the full weight of their situation, you rob them of the experience of solving their own problems. That experience is where confidence is built, resourcefulness develops, and people learn to trust themselves. Enabling subtly communicates, “I don’t believe you can do this without me,” and over time, people begin to believe that message about themselves.

Shifting from enabling to empowering

The shift isn’t about doing less; it is about doing differently.

• Support effort rather than just need by linking your help to their forward movement, however small.
• Make support time-bound and milestone-linked so that endpoints create accountability and protect you both.
• Offer what money can’t replace, like your connections, experience or time spent helping them think through a problem.
• Have an honest conversation calmly and proactively to name what you have observed and explain what is changing.

Black Tax is not a simple story of bad intentions and good people. It is complex, layered and deeply human. Most of the enabling that happens in African families happens because someone loves deeply and doesn’t yet have the language or the framework to love differently.

Honest reflection is necessary: are you really helping, or are you creating future dependency?