DINK Discourse
Parenthood should be a choice. Tell that to the right-wing influencers who spent the past week melting down about Dual Income, No Kids (DINK) couples.
A young couple—early 20s in some videos, older in others—speaks to the camera.
“We’re DINKs,” the partners invariably announce, before going on to list all the things they can do as a Dual Income, No Kids (DINK) couple. They go skiing. They take vacations on a whim. Their grocery shops are blissfully unburdened. Good for them!
The TikTok trend is innocuous; sweet, if a little cringey, as TikTok trends go. But in right-wing media, the videos have inspired something like a week-long aneurysm, with anti-choice influencers decrying childlessness as “immoral,” and eugenicist creeps waxing weird about the “end of bloodlines.”
This is not, of course, an authentic crisis on the right. It’s a cynical social cudgel against young people—realistically, women—who are considering the full measure of their bodily autonomy, in a week in which anti-abortion states are fighting a pair of court battles to force women to bear unwanted pregnancies. It’s a rage-bait feedback loop, with conservative clout hounds bashing reproductive rights on the basis of goofy TikTok videos, setting off an inorganic trend that incentivizes TikTokers to produce more DINK videos before the hashtag loses its juice and everyone moves onto the next social panic.
The trend, so far as I can tell, took off when a Twitter user who posts deep-cut fascist literature shared a TikTok of a 21-year-old couple discussing their lack of children. That video now has approximately 25 million views on Twitter, where it’s been shared as a sign of end times, and just over 5 million on TikTok.
Here’s the original TikTok. It’s normal.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It’s inspired new derivations, both mocking and earnest, as well as a handwringing discourse about the supposedly new “phenomenon” of couples without children.
Childless couples are nothing new. Indeed, Twitter’s “pro-natalist” pervs can rest easy in the knowledge that many DINK couples are only childfree for now, using these years to attain some measure of stability before having kids.
But a slightly growing percentage of the U.S. population appears to be opting out of parenthood altogether. According to 2018 census data, more than one in seven women between the ages of 40 and 44 was childless—up from approximately one in 10 in 1976. That change tracks alongside greater access to abortion and birth control, greater participation by women in the workplace, and the expansion of egalitarian legislation like no-fault divorce laws, all of which offer women greater freedom over their finances and reproductive choices.
And for some, those choices mean a conscious decision against having children. A MarketWatch survey this year revealed a combination of financial and personal priorities behind DINK couples’ choice against parenthood. 33 percent of respondents said they enjoyed the financial freedom of not having children, while 28 percent enjoyed the daily flexibilities of childree life, and 26 percent said they were financial unable to support a child.
A political movement that genuinely cared about promoting parenthood might pour its efforts into free childcare and healthcare and college, affordable housing, paid family leave, and the reproductive freedoms that make pregnancy safer. Those policies would make it easier for people to have their desired number of children, which, for some adults, will always remain zero.
The right, however, advocates few-to-none of those policies. And it is almost exclusively the right promoting the trend outside of TikTok, with outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire penning articles describing “‘DINK’ couples receive mixed responses after flaunting child-free lifestyle on TikTok” (Fox) and “The ‘DINK’ Trend: Double Income, No Kids, And A Meaningless Life Of Consumption And Materialism” (Daily Wire). The far-right outlet Human Events discussed the term during an all-male panel in which TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk called voluntary childlessness “immoral.”
Reproductive choice is at the heart of women’s fight for equality—an ideal the patriarchal right holds in contempt. Necessarily, some of the loudest voices bashing DINK videos are the same fringe pundits who sneer at working mothers, birth control, abortion, and public schools, pushing instead for women to forgo careers in favor of homeschooling large families in male-led households. Scroll a short distance on the “DINK” tag on Twitter/X, and you’ll find overt fascist accounts describing parenthood as a rebuttal to feminism. Children, in these accounts, are not cas as worthwhile people in their own right but as part of a demographic war to preserve “bloodlines” and “defend the west.”
Indeed, some men making anti-DINK arguments appear confused as to why they want children in the first place.
Elon Musk, father of 11(?) children by various women responded last week to Twitter user who claimed DINKs would live to regret their choices.
“There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids,” Musk wrote. “They are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age. That’s messed up.”
Are you having children so that they might tend to you in old age? Really? Are those children going to become doctors and gerontologists? I am willing to bet actual money that when Musk reaches advanced age, he will receive care from a well trained team of specialists and assistants.
As with the right’s insistence that daycare services constitute “stranger care” or that public schools unfairly force people to pay for “other people’s kids”’ education, posts like Musk’s are fundamentally allergic to the idea of living alongside other people in anything that could be recognized as a society.
Instead, they are concerned with controlling others’ labor, casting children as future employees, and childless women as would-be mothers slacking off on the job. Behind that characterization is the full legal weight of a Republican platform that is actively depriving women of their right to choose, and pushing workers into poverty that leaves them unable to support families.
Rather than grapple with the unpopularity of that platform, it’s easier for the right to invoke laziness when dunking on videos of young couples who proclaim their love of unbusy schedules and bountiful Costco runs.
Those TikTokers aren’t harbingers of civilizational collapse or whatever. They’re young people, making a common and reasonable decision. They’re figuring it out. Maybe they’ll change their minds about children and maybe they won’t. Either way, it’s none of our business.
Hey, thanks for reading this week’s Sunday MomLeft! Here’s what else I’ve been reading this week:
-Business Insider dug into an anti-abortion group that promised financial assistance for mothers who pledged not to get abortions during financially challenging pregnancies. The payments stopped coming, leading some mothers to say they feel conned into having children they cannot financially support.
-A Wired investigation found that censorship software at schools blocks students from accessing information about health and identity, as well as basic educational queries. “It will basically shut down your internet,” one tech administrator told Wired.
-Texas’s Supreme Court has overruled a lower court decision that would allow a woman to receive an abortion for a fetus that has Trisomy 18—a condition “that cannot sustain life” after birth. Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, faces serious health risks if forced to carry the pregnancy to term. While Cox’s lawyers fight a case that they describe as “stunning in its disregard for Ms. Cox’s life, fertility, and the rule of law,” a Kentucky woman is also suing her state for the right to receive an abortion. The Kentucky challenge, filed by a Jane Doe, argues that the state’s sweeping anti-choice legislation violates her rights under the Kentucky constitution.
-The Cut has an eye-opening interview with a sociologist who studied inequalities across preschools, where young students were largely segregated by class and race. While the quality in care was comparable across schools, the disruptions of poverty-related events like eviction and parental incarceration led to a cascading effect by which students in better-off preschools were entering kindergarten academically ahead of their lower-income peers.
“While the Head Start caregivers manage kids who struggle to fall in line with the classroom’s routines, they lose precious minutes in the day,” The Cut found. “Meanwhile, the Great Beginnings caregivers use those minutes to read aloud to the kids. Over time, the Great Beginnings kids are read to exponentially more than the Head Start kids, simply because of the aggregation of a few lost minutes throughout the day.”
-A self-plug: for paid subscribers last week, I dove into Vox’s ambitious new feature on millennial motherhood dread. You can read my take here.