If you’re a frequent user of social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and especially TikTok, you may have recently stumbled across videos or posts featuring a younger couple extolling the supposed virtues of remaining childless, including extra free time, more money, and lower stress levels.
The men and women in these videos invariably gush about how much better their lives are without children, and many pointedly replace a would-be child with a dog or cat, professing that they are much easier and more enjoyable than a child. These videos often depict relatively normal, day-to-day activities like making breakfast or taking a trip to the grocery store as well as extravagant shopping sprees and exotic vacations.
Welcome to the emerging “dual income, no kids” (otherwise known by the acronym DINK) trend.
DINKs are often couples in their late 20s to mid-30s who have made the choice to not have children in order to afford a more luxurious lifestyle and, so they say, have more freedom to pursue their own personal goals. Videos of these couples have racked up tens of millions of views and, perhaps more disturbingly, millions of likes online.
Here’s a common example:
There are going to be a lot of “DINKs” in the future in their 50s to 80s that are going to be regretting this strategy.
🔊
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 5, 2023
And another:
If I had to bet, 50-65% of DINKs (dual income no kids), who are their age (guessing late 20s/early 30s), change their minds. Much of DINKism is a rationalization of legit concerns about the expense of raising kids. As finances improve, opinions change.pic.twitter.com/dff5SI08BQ
— Steve Faktor (@ideafaktory) December 4, 2023
The first video has racked up 2 million views and over 220,000 likes on TikTok within days of being posted, while the second has garnered nearly 4 million views and 225,000 likes.
Though couples throughout history have chosen to not have children for a variety of reasons, it has only become a mainstream trend in the last few years. Radical feminists have argued for decades that childbearing impedes a woman’s ability to have a career or otherwise achieve self-fulfillment. Pre-pandemic, “childless by choice” rhetoric became popular among radical environmentalist groups, who argued that increasing the human population will further harm the environment and that children should not be brought into a world on the brink of a climate catastrophe.
Recent polls have found that even more people are choosing to not have children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 16.5% of people over the age of 55 were childless in 2018. In that same year, around one in seven women in the country between 40 and 44 were childless, up from one in ten in 1976.
A Pew survey conducted in October 2021 found that 44% of childless people younger than 50 said they are not likely to have children during their lives. That was an increase from 37% in 2018. A majority, 56%, of those who responded that they were unlikely to have children said that they didn’t want children “because they just don’t want to,” while 43% said they had a specific reason, including financial and medical considerations, for remaining childless.
Recent DINK videos seem to focus on the prospect of greater self-fulfillment as well as the greater economic freedom offered by remaining childless — likely due to ongoing inflation, rising home prices, stagnant wages, and the federal government’s monetary policies.
The median net worth of a couple without children was nearly $400,000 in 2022, according to data from a survey of consumer finances by the Federal Reserve. That median net worth is almost $150,000 higher than that of couples with children. Couples without children also have significantly more money saved for retirement than couples with children, the survey showed.
The DINK trend is beginning to take off just as concerns about global fertility rates are also increasing. X CEO Elon Musk has been especially vocal about the declining fertility rate, warning in 2022 that “population collapse” as a result of a plummeting birth rate is more dangerous to humanity than climate change.
Musk even responded to one of the recent viral DINK videos with an X post that said, “There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age. That’s messed up.”
There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age. That’s messed up.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2023
The current total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime) in the U.S. is 1.64 births per woman. The replacement level fertility rate for a society is 2.1 births per woman. Much of the United States’ population growth in recent years has been due to immigration as well as the fact that immigrants tend to have a higher fertility rate
The Census Bureau estimates that if the United States had no new immigration and only relied on domestic births for population growth, the total population of the country would decline from an estimated 333 million people in 2022 to only 226 million in 2100. Only in the medium and high immigration scenarios examined by the Census Bureau is the U.S. population projected to grow by 2100.
The population of the United States is also estimated to become significantly older because of declining birth rates. Whereas around 22% of the population was under 18 in 2022, it is expected to decline to 16.4% by 2100, with almost one-third of the entire population older than 65.
The most popular DINK videos appear to originate from TikTok, and that might provide a clue into why they seem to capture such a gigantic audience. Besides the fact that TikTok is a wildly popular app, boasting around 150 million users in the U.S. alone as of March 2023, the company has been accused of promoting harmful content in the past.
Since its initial rise in popularity, TikTok has become a haven for radical gender and race ideology, as extensively documented by the popular X account “Libs of TikTok.” In fact, by the end of 2021, videos on the app related to transgender ideology alone had racked up a combined 26 billion views. One study from late 2022 found that the app promoted self-harm and eating disorder-related content to users, according to CBS News.
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More recently, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) advocated cracking down on TikTok because it allegedly promoted pro-Hamas content in the wake of the terrorist organization’s attack on Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israelis.
The “dual income, no kids” trend may just be a fad borne from social media algorithms and economic pressures related to the COVID-19 pandemic, but unlike many other fleeting online trends, it has the potential to cause significant long-term harm to the country as birth rates continue to fall and the population continues to age. It remains to be seen what consequences DINKs will reap in exchange for the supposedly more carefree, luxurious lifestyle they’ve sown.
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