What Will Be the Result of DINKs?

My VIPs for this week are the couples who are not DINKs – couples with double incomes and no kids. DINKs have been celebrating on social media lately, showing pictures of all the fun things that they can do because they have extra money and no children on which to spend it.

The United States has a falling marriage rate as well as a below replacement birthrate. We cannot put all the blame on DINKS for the falling birthrate because they are a recent phenomenon, but they could have an increasing effect if the numbers continue to grow.

The United States needs to have an average of 2.8 children per woman of childbearing age to replace the people who die. The rate has been falling since 1971 and has been below the replacement rate since 2007. However, the rate of births has been increasing since 2020 as shown by the following figures. The same site has a chart of the U.S. fertility rate from 1950 to 2023 and the United Nations’ projection through 2100. 

·         The current fertility rate for U.S. in 2023 is 1.784 births per woman, a 0.11% increase from 2022.

·         The fertility rate for U.S. in 2022 was 1.782 births per woman, a 0.06% increase from 2021.

·         The fertility rate for U.S. in 2021 was 1.781 births per woman, a 0.11% increase from 2020.

·         The fertility rate for U.S. in 2020 was 1.779 births per woman, a 0.06% increase from 2019.

The chart shows that the United States was above the replacement level in the period 1978 to 1989, at the current time, and again at approximately 2050. The rest of the time, the United States is below the birthrate replacement level.

The only reason that Americans stay close to the replacement rate is that immigrants and members of some religions have more babies than average. Catholics and Latter-day Saints tend to have larger families with the average LDS family having three to four children.

In her article published in The Deseret News, Hanna Seariac wrote of two groups who have no children – DINKS and SINKS (single income no kids). Not all DINKS plan to permanently have no children. Some of them plan to build a strong financial foundation before having children. Others do not plan to have any children. Seariac gave the following numbers: 

·         Couples with no children tend to have a higher net worth (just shy of $399,000) (fewer expenses than couples with children).

·         Couples with children (around $250,000).

·         Average middle-class family with two children will spend about $310,605 over 17 years to rear their children – about $18,000 per year not counting college.

·         The poverty rate among childless older adults is higher than couples with children because of a pattern of adult children caring for eldering parents, saving a significant amount of money. Average cost of a nursing home is $10,830 per month with an assisted living facility averaging $5,806 – quickly eating away a higher net worth.

·         SINKs are in the toughest spot financially because they pay all their housing and expenses out of one income without the help of a second income.

Children bring additional expenses, but they also bring blessings, such as increasing the health of a society by way of social capital.

Social support is vital for all human beings and having children can lead to an expansive family network. When your kids grow up and develop relationships on their own, those relationships sometimes become part of your life, too. “These social ties provide a safety net, when available for information and advice, if and when it is needed,” Jim Dalrymple wrote in an article for Institute for Family Studies.

Dalrymple cited Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar who observed that as people enter their 60s, their friends start to pass away and “we lack the energy and the motivation (and are less mobile as well) to seek and build new friendships.” Having family networks in place can counteract this effect as a person would have a larger social group of varying ages to depend on.

Having children may lead to higher levels of long-term happiness, but it also may not. So, while data is mixed on that front, research has found that having kids leads to more daily joy and daily stress. And it leads to a higher level of feeling like life has meaning.

Besides “individual financial well-being, happiness and sense of purpose,” low fertility rates impact the macro level.

Wendy Wang, director of research for The Institute of Family Studies, previously told the Deseret News that a lower fertility rate could mean “an economic crisis.” With fewer people in the workforce, the economy could be negatively impacted. Home sales is another area that may take a hit: the current housing shortage obscures what could happen in the future — too many houses for too few people.

A health brief from Pew indicated that declining fertility rates could negatively impact schools, state budgets (fewer people paying taxes) and how much money is being spent in the economy. It’s worth noting that one significant reason people in the U.S. are not having children is they feel like they can’t afford it.

“Given that most people say they intend to have kids, the fact that people aren’t actually having children means there’s probably some larger factors at play,” Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center, said. “There is not a lot of support for parents in the U.S., and young adults face a lot of challenges — student loan debt, the high cost of housing, job insecurity — that may lead them to delay, or maybe even give up on, having children.”

The “long-term economic costs of a lower fertility rate are significant,” but there may be good news – larger families may be making a comeback.

“As people get richer, as economies get more prosperous, it seems like people have fewer and fewer kids,” Charles Jones, Stanford University professor of economics, said. “From an individual family standpoint, that may be totally rational and may be the right thing to do, but the macro implications of that are really profound.”

Environmentalists may believe that fewer children will help to save the planet. However, Sigal Samuel, “analyzed the impact of having children on the climate and found t hat there are a bevy of far more effective ways to improve the environment than not having children.” ‘Children aren’t just emitters of carbon. They’re also extraordinarily efficient emitters of joy and meaning and hope,’ Samuel wrote for Vox.”  

Jones warned that continuing low birth rates will cause standards of living to stagnate and the economy to slow down. This means that the environment may be sustained better with more people living on earth to find solutions to the problems. The American trend to larger families may save the environment after all that the environments try to stop them.