Latter-day Saints’ penchant for big families was a recent punchline for the conservative satirical website, Babylon Bee: instead of being DINKs — double income, no kids — Latter-day Saints are OINKs — one income, nine kids.
Latter-day Saints aren’t quite having nine kids (it’s closer to an average of three or four) and many of these households have two earners. That said, Latter-day Saints are having children at a higher rate than the national average.
With declining marriage rates and falling U.S. birthrates, there’s been a spotlight on another phenomenon: DINKs.
DINK is a trendy way of describing a child-free couple. Across social media, especially TikTok, self-identified DINKs are posting about their lifestyles, which include dashing off to Trader Joe’s on a whim and taking luxurious vacations because of their disposable income.
Some DINKs, like Jadyn Bryden and her husband, say their current lifestyle is actually in preparation to having children. “DINK status is not necessarily always a long term thing,” she told Time Magazine. “We’re using this time as an opportunity to put together a strong financial foundation so we won’t have to struggle in the future.” Other self-proclaimed DINKs do not have plans to have any children.
Couples with no children tend to have a higher net worth (just shy of $399,000) than those who have children (around $250,000), according to the Survey of Consumer Finances by the Federal Reserve System. With two people in a household and no children, DINKs have fewer expenses than couples with children.
An average middle-class family with two children will spend around $310,605 over the course of 17 years to raise those children, per a Brookings Institute report. That translates to around $18,000 per year. This figure did not include the price of college.
While average net worth among couples with no children may be higher, the poverty rate among childless older adults is higher than couples with children, per a U.S. Department of Commerce report.
One of the long-established patterns in society is adult children taking care of their aging parents. This can delay the necessity of paying for full-time caregivers, which is a significant expense, or even replace it altogether. The average cost of a nursing home is $10,830 per month while an assisted living facility averages at $5,806, CNN reported. These potential additional costs can quickly eat away at a higher net worth.
There’s also another group to mention: SINKs. Single income, no kids. Compared to both couples with children and couples without children, SINKs are in the toughest spot financially. They shoulder the cost of housing and other expenses alone and run into some of the same issues as DINKs do with long-term finances, except they don’t have an additional earner to offset the cost.
In addition to long-term financial health, having children can increase the health of a society via 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.
Eudaimonic well-being is generally hard to measure. The term refers to a sense of well-being that involves long-term happiness and a deeply-held sense of purpose and meaning in life. When both women and men become parents, they experience a rise in eudaimonic meaning, according to the Journal of Family Issues.
Zooming out from individual financial well-being, happiness and sense of purpose, what do lower rates of fertility translate to on a 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 negative 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.”
In other words, while rising costs may make it difficult for some couples to have children, the long-term economic costs of a lower fertility rate are significant.
“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.”
While some have argued that having fewer children would lead to a more sustainable planet, others disagree.
Another writer, Sigal Samuel, analyzed the impact of having children on the climate and found that 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 if birth rates continue to be low, standards of living will stagnate, the economy will slow down and that environmental sustainability would be better served by having more people on the earth to find innovation solutions.
Even as there is a lower overall birthrate, there’s another trend occurring: American preference for bigger families is making a comeback. Seeing more OINKs might be just around the corner after all.