 There was this video that was circulating the internet a few weeks ago about the dink community, the double income, no kids. There was a TikTok trend where people are describing what is life as a dink and why am I choosing not to have kids? Why am I choosing this child-free life? I thought that we could play a role that clip of this one that went viral because it's a good jumping off point to talk a little bit more about these trade-offs and why people are making these choices and how much these choices are actually grounded in the economic reality. So best, could you run the dinks clip for us? We go to Trader Joe's and workout classes on the weekends. We're dinks. We get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing. We're dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We're dinks. We're already planning our European vacation next year. Dinks. We get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more. We're dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We're dinks. We can play with other kids and give them back. We're dinks. We still do it three times a week. We're dinks. We spend our discretionary income on $8 latte. We're dinks. We max out our 401ks, Roth IRAs and HSAs. We're dinks. We don't use our kids or dog as an excuse to leave a party. We just leave. So, I mean, my reaction to this initially was like, first of all, it is funny and like, it's okay to be a dink and dink life is fun. But I felt like they were kind of overstating some of the material sacrifices. But what are your thoughts on the dink video, Tim? Well, first thing I would think is, so I'm in a different stage of life than you guys. My oldest is a high school junior. My youngest is seven years old. And my wife, our problem is that our social life is too crowded because of our kids, friends, and we have tons of parties. And we're again, we're renting now. And so we don't, you know, host, throw parties as much. And one of our kids, I overheard somebody said, Oh, do your parents entertain a lot? And one of my kids said, No, my parents are entertained a lot because we're going to other people's houses for parties. And so they're a they're comparing themselves to people, you know, with babies and very young children and not to people with grown children who, you know, occasionally are able to get up and leave. And on the other hand, the idea that maxing out your HSA is like really something to celebrate and talk about while on your vacation in Florida, that struck me as sort of a very sad note right there. And this is one of the things that I encountered as I went around and I talked to people. A big part of my job has always been what I call bar reporting or coffee shop reporting, just talking to strangers. And the great thing about writing a book on parenting is that everybody has something to say, either they are parents or they want to be or they've chosen not to be. And one of the things was the sadness, the sort of banality of the explanations behind why I'm not going to become a parent. A lot of times it was one woman just said, I'd love to have kids. I love spending time with kids. I'd love to have my own. But it would it would weaken my career a little bit. And then if my husband divorced me, I'd be in a disadvantageous place. So basically, it was like unemployment insurance. It was this insurance policy, basically why she was not making this choice. And so just to see some of those things, it's it's, I mean, we've all had bad reasons for doing things. And some of those are are pretty sad $8 lattes is a pretty sad reason to not have kids. Yeah, and to your earlier point, you know, some of the I feel like there's there are a lot of economic myths out there. I mean, housing is one thing that's just that's a serious impediment, I think, to a lot of people having kids. And we can talk about housing a little bit later. But as you note in your book, millennials have as much wealth as prior generations. And as you go up the wealth ladder to a point, you start having less kids. So it's not so clear that it's just about economics. And, you know, could it be that some of that mythology just needs to be punctured, the idea that we're like more strapped than ever and kids are going to bankrupt you? No, absolutely. And Jeremy Horpdahl is the is the numbers guy who's who constantly does this. He just does an inflation adjusted wealth and income comparing boomers to Gen X. I'm always grateful that he remembers that we exist because most commentators don't but boomers to Gen X millennials at a given age and shows that the wealth is basically equal across those three and affordability of certain of goods that a family would buy. How does that compare to you know, hours of work and he shows that that is largely stable across the last few decades. And so the the affordability thing, I keep coming back to culture. I think part of it and Angela Rashidi, who's my colleague at AEI and Melissa Carney, who's at Brookings Institution and University of Maryland, they keep pointing out that part of the reason that it feels so much more unaffordable to raise kids. And to some extent is can be less affordable depending on your life is that fewer people have a culture that surrounds them that helps them raise their kids. Largely, I'm talking about extended family. When my kids were little, my wife's little sisters babysat them. Now that my wife's little sisters have babies. It's my oldest, that same one who they were babysitting. She's babysitting her cousins. And that's a sort of culture that's very pro family that's very supportive of in Israel. It's just very explicit because people are expected to have kids, people are expected to help other people take care of kids. There's not a mindset about your kids or your choice like buying a boat. So it's your problem. And I'm not really, I'm not talking about welfare state policies or that sort of thing. Let's talk about cultural expectations. You should help people raise their kids. You should have a community that's pro family that expects people to show up at whatever you're showing up with kids in tow. And that if you live in a culture or subculture that's not family friendly, you think, I have to pay for everything. And then life does start to become less affordable. Yeah, I haven't thinking about these themes so much because I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss's publication, The Free Press, about being a quote unquote young mom, which is a little bit of an absurd thing because I had my child at 26, right? That's not particularly young by global standards. That's not even particularly young by American standards. It's the median, a median age at first child in the United States for women is 26.3. So rightfully, very much the norm. However, in my milieu of journalists who live in New York City, upper middle class women, college educated, went to a pretty good school, that whole subset of American society, this is something where having a kid at 25 or 26 is very unheard of. And there's this cultural expectation that you'll push it off until later. So the thing that's been so interesting for me is I was in this Park Slope moms group and it was fascinating to me, the things that the 40 year old moms, because many of them were legitimately 15 years older than me, the things that they think you need to have in place before having a child and even physical goods that they think you need, it feels as though we almost have concocted a sort of absurd sense of how much having a kid actually costs. And surely, if you buy absolutely everything new, and expect to be shelling out $200,000 for your kid to go to an excellent elite college, and you're expecting to pay for daycare for every single year, so that you can maintain your job. Sure, having a kid is awfully expensive, but there are an awful lot of ways to minimize these things and to come up with more creative arrangements to get around all of that. To me, it seems like there's like, if we look at things one way and if we assume that X, Y, and Z things must be in place before starting a family, of course it seems unattainable to an entire generation of women, but if we rethink what things are necessary precursors, it really changes. Absolutely, and so I ran focus groups, and actually it was the men in my focus groups who were more likely to say, look, the reason I'm not ready and won't be ready anytime soon to have kids is because I don't want to just give them the bare minimum. I want to give them the best of everything. I can promise you guys, we do not give our kids the best of everything. We found a used piano, and it's still out of tune, and they still love playing on it. Once we made the mistake of travel baseball, that's a whole discussion in the book, but basically we sent them to the local rec leagues and all of that, and they do the basic violin lessons at school. None of them has gotten good at violin, trumpet, trombone. One son is good at guitar because he's interested in girls now, but we haven't given them lessons or the best of everything, and that idea that you do have to give the kids the best of everything, that's again not just a cause, but a consequence of smaller families. This idea that I cite in the book of, well, it's good that we're choosing quality parenting over quantity. I argue it's not good because then it makes people think you have to give your kids these really expensive enrichment, et cetera, the best of everything, and then you have fewer kids, and then because you have fewer kids you invest more in each. That's not necessarily even good for the kids or the parents if everybody's constantly anxious that playing the piano goes from something fun to do around Christmas with Christmas carols to being basically a job that's going to get you your scholarship into college. Nobody's happy or the high quote quality parenting isn't high quality. It's just more expensive and more anxiety inducing. See you next week.