Living as a couple without children is no longer a stage in the family course but a goal. This is confirmed by the sociologist and researcher at the Center d'Estudis Demográfics (CED) of the UAB Pau Miret in view of how the number of households made up of couples of adults with two salaries and without children has grown in Spain (which the Anglo-Saxons called DINK, acronym for dual income, not kids) in recent years.
“The key is the age of the members of those households; Before, they were young people in an intermediate stage between the beginning of cohabitation and the moment of deciding (or being able) to have children; Now they are older adults whose fertility pattern is finalized because the increase in the age group over 44-45 years has been exponential,” she explains.
The Habits data (a big data developed by the firm Ais Group that offers a statistical portrait of Spanish society based on information from the census, the cadastre, the register, the family budget survey, the living conditions survey, and data from the SEPE or the AEMET, among others) indicate that 15% of Spanish households are DINK. And while those made up of young couples who form their first home evolve downwards due to the delay in the age of emancipation, those made up of older couples do not stop growing.
Specifically, the number of DINK couples under 35 years of age has gone from representing 6.3% of all households to 5.8% between 2019 and 2022, according to the latest data from Habits. On the other hand, the weight of DINK couples whose members are between 35 and 65 years old has grown by 2.6 percentage points in those three years and now represents 9.2% of all Spanish families.
Miret attributes this evolution to the drop in fertility during recent decades. “We have had the infertility rate on the rise for four decades and it has reached 20%; That is, one in five women born in the late 70s or early 80s – the last generation that has completed its fertility cycle – has not had children,” she says.
Luis Ayuso, professor of Sociology at the University of Malaga who has studied the evolution of couples in Spain, assures that the model of double-earning heterosexual couples, which in the 80s and 90s of the last century was still something new, is now the norm throughout the country.
“What has changed in these decades and justifies the increase in DINK homes is the delay in motherhood, the fact that the period in which couples get to know each other before having children has lengthened: if couples in the 70s had children after a year of living together, those of the 80s already began to delay that moment, in the 2000s the average period was already four years, and now that delay is greater, so that many do not consider motherhood or fatherhood until they turn 40 and others directly decide not to have children,” explains Ayuso.
And he links this change to that experienced by the Spanish labor market, where labor mobility has grown a lot and there is little family support or facilities for work-life balance. “Today having two salaries is not a luxury, it is a necessity, and it is very difficult for couples who are dedicated to working to make it compatible with having children,” he says.
Miret agrees that there are economic and social reasons for the rise of DINK homes. The delay in emancipation, job instability or the difficulty in finding a partner lead many people to decide to become parents when the possibility of having children naturally is already very reduced due to their age. But he assures that we are also witnessing a cultural change: “Children are no longer fundamental in the biography of people or couples.”
Because, he explains, one of the main reasons given by people who did not have children until now was that they did not have a partner or had not found the right one to have children. But in the case of DINKs, they are people who live as a couple, who have income, and some may have started trying to have children late but many others did not consider having one from the beginning of the relationship.
“In the United States, the DINK phenomenon has been studied for a long time and it is seen that there is a growing number of people who are not willing to make sacrifices to have children, even in the wealthiest classes,” comments the CED researcher.
Because dual-income couples know that they will have less availability of resources and time if they have children, and that one of them - in heterosexual couples, usually the woman - is likely to have to cut back on their hours or leave the labor market.
"Couples with double income have high expectations as a couple, both members have resources and value their work a lot, they know that having children means that someone must give in (children today are very planned and projected) and the woman - to whom "It is often more difficult for her than a man to have a job or to achieve the same professional recognition - instead of giving up her career (as many of the previous generation had been doing), she gives up motherhood," agrees Ayuso, who chairs the committee of family sociology research from the Spanish Federation of Sociology (FES).
And it highlights how there are large companies that are offering their employees egg freezing so that they do not stop their professional career to have children and postpone possible motherhood.
That is why both he and Miret believe that there is a good chance that the number of households of dual-income couples without children will continue to increase in the coming years.
"In the field of European demographics there are still many researchers who think that the rise in the percentage of young people who say they do not want to have children is 'a thing of age', of the instability they feel at the time of entering the job market, but The truth is that double-earning couples in Spain and other southern European countries only have two possible scenarios: either share the care of the children (and that model does not seem to work very well when push comes to shove) or not having them,” says Miret.
