- Some DINKs are using their higher net worth to retire early, travel, and afford luxury items.
- But others are childless due to financial constraints and the high costs of raising a child.
- The current economic climate is creating people who can’t afford to shed the DINK status.
If you’ve heard the acronym DINK lately, you might have this publication to blame.
In recent months, we’ve written about DINKs — Dual Income, No Kids — using their inflated net worths to retire early, travel the world, and buy boats.
For some, being a DINK is almost like a cheat code for achieving the American dream: It allows adults to sidestep the economic walls closing in on many millennials and Gen Zers struggling to afford housing, childcare, and healthcare. DINKs are in a better position to buy houses, go on vacations, and plan to retire early.
But it’s not all romantic getaways and immaculate houses.
Even people who are happy to be childfree sometimes feel left behind or isolated in a culture that still deems parenthood the correct life path. But there’s an even darker side to DINKs: The slice that forgoes kids not by choice but out of necessity. These are the Americans who would love to be parents but find that they can’t swing it financially. They’re more accurately described as childless rather than childfree.
It’s difficult to parse out the exact number of Americans who might want kids but can’t have them. We know that the childfree group — people who don’t want kids — might be about 20% of the US adult population. But it’s harder to track down the people who might otherwise have kids were the circumstances different.
A survey from NerdWallet and Harris Poll polling over 2,000 US adults in December found that 56% of non-parents don’t plan to have kids. Of this group, 31% said that the “overall cost of raising a child is too high.”
“The big takeaway — and what really stood out to me — is just how big the cost of having kids looms for both current parents who are considering having more kids, and also people who don’t have children yet,” Kimberly Palmer, personal finance expert at NerdWallet, told BI.
In an economy as large as the US’s, any story about the economy is probably true somewhere. It’s why some industries can’t fill open jobs while people in other professions struggle to find a new role, or why a country where jobs are abundant and wages on the rise also has a housing and childcare affordability crisis — and a dreary general economic outlook. And when it comes to DINKs, that duality is true as well — for some, it’s a boon; for others, it’s less of a choice than a need.
“We have over 150 million people working in the US economy,” Kathryn Edwards, an economist at the RAND Corporation, previously told BI. “Whatever can be true is true for at least one person. Having that many workers means that you can have two true stories that are in absolute conflict, and it totally makes sense that they’re both in our labor market.”
While there are signs that our society is coming to greater acceptance of childfree people, evidence points to our economy moving in the opposite direction. A Business Insider calculation earlier this year found that parents could spend $26,000 raising a kid in 2024. As birth rates are dropping, costs for housing, childcare, and medical care are rising. It’s contributing to a whole population of DINKs who can’t afford to shed the moniker.
‘We’re fine with a single mom working 60 hours a week paying for daycare’
Larry Bienz, 38, is a social worker and DINK in Chicago. He said he might be a parent in a different country, one with different priorities and infrastructure. But he’s chosen not to be in this one.
In our society, Bienz said, “the first and foremost priority is that people are working in a job. Everything else comes after making sure that we are working on a job.”
He could imagine a life where he has kids, but the lifestyle it would require — both parents juggling jobs, housework, and childcare on little sleep — just doesn’t seem sustainable.
Bienz already feels like he doesn’t have enough time to invest in not just pleasure activities but also being civically engaged and part of his community. Layer onto that, as Bienz notes, a country with a stagnant minimum wage and without guaranteed paid leave or affordable healthcare, where parents rely on underpaid educators and day care workers. Meanwhile, in other countries, parents can have up to a year of paid parental leave guaranteed.
“Our system says, ‘Oh, it’s okay. You can get up to 12 weeks unpaid and you won’t get fired from your job,” Bienz said. “It’s like, what a joke. ‘Oh, I won’t get fired for my job if I want to stay home with my baby for a while!'”
Bienz pointed to the example of the “welfare queen” — a concept “packed full of racism” — as an example of what it feels like the system won’t allow: Someone using public resources to feed and house their family without working a job.
“The one thing we can’t live with is a welfare queen,” he said. “We’re perfectly fine with, let’s just say, a single mom working 60 hours a week paying for daycare.”
That’ll be $30,000, please
Amelia and Kevin desperately want to be parents.
The couple — who are 37 and 43 respectively — have been trying to get pregnant for 18 months. They’ve bought a bigger house in a good school district in anticipation of the kids who would come. But there’s no baby for them yet. And in a country where reproductive care is more scant by the moment, and health insurance only offers a piecemeal approach to affording treatment, they’re having to think about how much, exactly, they can afford to spend on the act of having a child.
“We’re the ideal situation. We’re a happily married couple. We have good jobs, we’re well educated,” Amelia, whose last name is known to BI but withheld for privacy reasons, said. “What infertility feels like — it feels like every month you’re attending a class and at the end of the month you go to take the final and the teacher comes up to you and goes, what are you doing? You’re not in this class.”
The couple hasn’t yet invested in medical interventions like intrauterine insemination (IUI) or in vitro fertilization (IVF) yet, but have already spent over $1,000 on treatments, therapy, and doctor’s visits — and that’s with insurance. More in-depth treatment, like IVF, likely wouldn’t be covered, they said. And that’s before considering any other potential risks, as reproductive rights and access to IVF become more imperiled in the US.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine estimates that the average cost of an IVF cycle is $12,400, and other estimates have it coming in closer to $25,000. Meanwhile, adoption in the US can end up costing anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000, per the US Children’s Bureau. Comparatively, the median household income in the US is $74,580, meaning a household trying to embark upon parenthood through nontraditional means might be putting over a third of their earnings toward it.
As countries around the world bemoan falling population rates and some politicians in the US try to limit access to abortion, Amelia thinks the government could step in.
“Everyone’s saying you shouldn’t abort, you should put your kid up for adoption, you should adopt. I’m like, great, let us adopt,” Amelia said. “Oh no, that’d be $30,000, please.”
Amelia’s not alone: In the NerdWallet survey of people who were not parents, 11% of respondents said it was because the cost of infertility treatments was too high, and 10% similarly said that the cost of adoption is too high. Those high costs are also colliding with a perfect reproductive storm as treatments like IVF become potentially even riskier.
“In Michigan, we saw a big jump in the number of child-free people following the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” Zachary Neal, a professor in Michigan State University’s psychology department’s social-personality program, told me. In anecdotal responses in a landmark study of childfree adults Neal conducted with fellow Michigan State psychology professor — and his wife — Jennifer Neal, men were even thinking about the decision’s repercussions, saying that they would not want to expose their partner to potential medical risks. “Both men and women are thinking in this climate, it just became too risky to be a pregnant person.”
The baby elephant in the room
Priscilla Davies is a 41-year-old actor, writer, and content creator. As an elder millennial, she’s seen the ups and downs of multiple “economic crises.” Davies is single and childfree by choice — in part because of the ways that marriage places uneven gendered burdens upon women.
“The establishment calls out the issues — they call it out from the wrong angle — and they’re like, ‘Oh, millennials are killing families. They don’t want to have children. They’re so selfish. They’re always coming at it from the wrong angle as opposed to calling out what the issue is. And it’s basically an elephant in the room,” Davies said. “We all know that this economic system does not work.”
Younger parents have told Business Insider that the idea of the caretaking village has been washed away by ever-higher costs, skyrocketing rents, grandparents still working, and the loss of safe third spaces for kids and parents alike to congregate. Without a village, parenthood feels even more untenable.
“We should be providing financial assistance to parents. Just point blank, period. You have a child, we as a social society are invested in our children, so let’s help people raise their children and that community, unfortunately — because we live in this hyper-capitalistic environment — that community is going to have to come at this stage from money,” Davies said.
The tale of two DINKs — those who have happily opted into the lifestyle and others who have been pushed in — might sound like a story of diverging paths. But, ultimately, they’re sides of the same coin: They want to have a choice.
For the DINKs who are happily living it up, that means the choice to exist peacefully and respectfully as a childfree adult. It means a world that respects their choices and can envision something beyond a traditional family structure that provides meaning, love, and satisfaction.
And for the DINKs-by-default, it means a path to parenthood, no matter their financial standing.
Right now, though, neither is reality. And that’s leading childfree and childless people alike to experience isolation and difficult calculations. As for Amelia and Kevin, they said they’re taking it one step at a time.
“It really comes down to do you have the money to have a child? And that’s a very depressing situation to be in,” Amelia said. “How much is a child worth it to you? Isn’t a child worth $30,000? Isn’t it worth it to you? I’m like, of course it’s worth it, but I don’t have $30,000.”
Are you unable to become a parent because of costs or lack of social safety nets? Contact this reporter at jkaplan@businessinsider.com.
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