‘Dinky’ podcast by two Oregonians embraces the dual income, no kids lifestyle

Adults who decide to not have children have faced criticism for being “selfish” or derided as “childless cat ladies.”

The term DINK has been used to describe people who have dual incomes and no kids.

In the Portland metro area, Erika Abdelatif and Kristen Myers have created “Dinky,” a podcast which takes a lighthearted approach about their lifestyle and features other guests who are similarly childfree.

The show covers news and pop culture, with past episodes featuring a range of topics, including discussions on feminism, traveling without kids and artificial intelligence.

Dinky has generated a sizable following on social media, including TikTok and Instagram.

Abdelatif and Myers join us to talk about their show and why it’s resonating with audiences.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with the “Dinky” podcast. It was started two years ago by Erika Abdelatif and Kristen Myers, best friends who live in the Portland area who both decided to not have children. DINK stands for dual income, no kids. Adults who decide to not have children have long faced criticism for being “selfish” or “short-sighted.” More recently, they’ve been derided as “childless cat ladies” who are running and ruining this country. The “Dinky” podcast, which has gained a sizable following on social media, is a lighthearted but steel-spined pushback, a proud celebration of the childfree life.

Erika Abdelatif and Kristen Myers, it’s great to have both of you on the show.

Erika Abdelatif: Thank you so much for having us.

Kristen Myers : Thank you.

Miller: Erika, first – how did this podcast come to be?

Abdelatif: That’s a great question. Actually, Kristen, do you want to take this one?

Myers: Yeah, it actually was more of my world that started this. So, back when I was about 33, 34, I had just gotten married and it really came down to that time where I was like, I need to make a decision about whether I’m having kids. And so I basically started researching logistics, like next steps, how much does it cost to get daycare in my neighborhood? What are logistical operations? I was considering adoption. What do I need to think about when considering adoption? All these basic next steps when you’re planning a family.

I was like, oh my gosh, it’s so expensive. My first thought was that daycare is more expensive than my rent. I lived in Seattle at the time and it was about $3,000 per child. And I was like, I don’t even know how to afford that. I work in tech, I have a good job. My husband was a PhD student. So we were doing pretty well, but I didn’t know how we could afford it. So I started questioning it, just based on the finances alone. Obviously, there’s a lot of considerations that go into having a kid that were top of mind for me.

I just started having these back and forth conversations with Erika, and Erika was my only proud childfree friend at that time. And as we started having these conversations about the pros and cons of having kids, we started to question, maybe that this is something other women could benefit from if we have this conversation more publicly. So that was the origin story.

Miller: Those first episodes .. the first one was called “Do children make you happier?” [Laughter] The second one is “How much does it cost to raise a child?” I think it says “spoiler alert” a lot. [Laughter] The third one was about tools to help people make decisions about whether or not to have kids. Erika, how much has a podcast changed since those first days?

Abdelatif: That’s a really great question. I think it’s changed a lot, to be honest. In that first season, our focus was really just about helping Kristen, to be honest, make a decision. And so we were investigating a lot of those big picture ideas. And now that we’re more solidified, both of us, in our decision, it has become a lot more just like, this is our choice. We’re going to be proud about it. We’re not going to back down on how we feel. And we’ve had a lot of fun just kind of investigating that and having a good time.

Miller: So if this was about helping Kristen make her decision, where were you? I mean, what has your own path been like to come to this decision?

Abdelatif: Yes, that’s a great question. So I actually really like kids and I have a history of working with children. I worked with kids professionally for, I think, close to 10 years.

Miller: You say that as if Kristen hates kids [Laughter], as opposed to deciding to not have them herself. But yeah, I don’t think that’s what you meant. “I actually like kids …” [Laughter]

Abdelatif: No, we do have a lot of people in our audience who don’t like kids and I think that’s a fine stance. But for us, we both really like kids. I have liked kids for a long time.

Myers: We both always thought we would have kids. We both worked with kids. I was a camp counselor. I was a babysitter. So that was kind of our background story of always wanting kids.

Abdelatif: Yeah. But for me, specifically, like having that job, I interfaced a lot with mothers. It became very apparent to me that moms carry so much emotional and physical labor when it comes to parenting, that dads just don’t carry. I think the Pew Research Center found that even in egalitarian households where parents are bringing in equal amounts of money, moms are carrying over two times the the burden of both chores and caregiving. So it’s a huge task to take on.

I think for me as I was in my late twenties, investigating what I really want from my life, I realized you can’t have it all, to be honest. And I think for me, it was like, where do I want to contribute in the world? What kind of person do I want to be? And where can I make the biggest impact? And I realized that I want to get so much more fulfillment out of my career, out of the ways that I contribute to my neighborhood and my community. Ultimately, you really can’t have both. So I think, for me, it was really just like that personal decision had to be made. And it felt like the right choice.

Miller: Kristen, over the years when we have talked to women who are childfree by choice … and I emphasize the word “women” because I feel like, for maybe some obvious but not good reasons, so often this is the way society talks about these decisions. It’s women who bear the brunt of the questions about it and even conversations like this. But we’ve often heard stories about people, often men, saying to women: “you’re going to regret your choice at some point in the future, when you get older.” How common is that among your guests?

Myers : So we talk about it pretty much with most guests, because that’s a common question I guess that’s in our faces constantly. The social media comments we get every single day probably have some focus on, we’re “gonna regret it” when we get older.

Miller: You still get that every day?

Myers: Oh, every day.

Abdelatif: All the time. Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, we have more than 100,000 followers on social media at this point, across all of our channels. So people have a lot to say about our content.

Miller: And about your personal lives and your job.

Abdelatif: Yeah

Myers: Definitely. But I do think one of the best guests that we’ve had recently, that was a good reflection of this, was a childfree advocate. Her name is Marcia Drut-Davis. She’s 82 now, was 81 when we had her on the show, and she spoke a lot about how she couldn’t wait to get older. Because she got that question or I guess …

Abdelatif: Perspective

Myers: … perspective of being told that she was going to regret it when she was older. And she couldn’t wait to get older, she said, because she knew they were wrong. And here, 82 years young, she’s still very proud of her decision, has no regrets. And she says, of the people who are her friends who she’s aged with, it actually hasn’t been her family that have taken care of her friends. It’s been their friends. So her advice to us was to build a strong community of friends, because oftentimes she’s witnessed that friends are the ones that are there for you at the end of your life, not necessarily your family.

Miller: At the beginning of episodes, you “DINK” yourselves. What does that mean? [Laughter]

Abdelatif: So, as you’ve mentioned, DINK stands for dual income, no kids. And we recognize that we have more disposable time and money than our counterparts who have children. And so “DINK yourself” really became a way for us to kind of have a fun and lighthearted opportunity to talk about the things, whether it’s something that we bought or something that we did that we couldn’t do if we had kids.

Miller: What’s an example, Kristen, of a dinking yourself that comes to mind now, a recent one?

Myers : Oh, wow. This is embarrassing. But I’ll tell you … [Laughter]

Miller: You have a podcast, where you regularly … you say all this to your audience.

Myers : Yes. Well, you’re going to hear a fresh one that Erika hasn’t even heard yet. Last night, I was on my favorite social media platform, TikTok, and somebody had met with a pet psychic. The pet psychic told her all the things her cat was telling her. And so I reserved a booking – $150 for a pet psychic on TikTok.

Abdelatif: [Laughter] I cannot believe you didn’t tell me this!

Myers : Well, it was a surprise. I was excited to tell you on the podcast, but here we are here.

Abdelatif: Here we are.

Miller: Is this going to be done remotely or will the pet psychic come to your house?

Myers : Remotely, it seems. Yeah.

Miller: What’s your pet?

Myers : A dog. I’m a childless dog lady.

Miller: That does remind me that we got some comments on Facebook. Katie Schatzel wrote: “They need one that says OIBD – one income but dogs.” [Laughter]

Jenn Helvie wrote on Facebook: “I live in a DINK household with my partner. We are both in our 40s. Neither one of us had aspirations that included kids. My biggest reason for being childfree is split between time commitment and expense.” She went on to say, “I also worry about issues such as climate change, a widely conservative government that seems to be planning on taking away choices from various groups of people. The world is on fire.”

I want to go back to the question of gender. Do you have a sense for the gender breakdown of your listeners?

Myers : It is 90% women, 10% of women.

Abdelatif: Heavily women. Yeah.

Miller: How do you explain that?

Abdelatif: Well, I think there’s a lot of things. I think, first and foremost, Kristen and I both feel like the burden of desiring parenthood really falls on women. Growing up, for girls, it’s like you carry a baby doll, you’re taught to grocery shop as playtime. We don’t really see the same expectation for young men.

I think it’s interesting now because we’re seeing a little bit of a shift in society, where women, as they’re coming of age and growing up, realizing that they have a lot of aspirations and dreams for themselves that weren’t necessarily presented to them in childhood. Whereas, I think a lot of young men are starting to realize that, for them, it’s their legacy or it’s their fantasy they have about being like the patriarch of a family. So we’re kind of seeing a shift in society now where a lot of young men are actually desiring to be fathers, I would say more so than a lot of women. But yeah, I think a lot of it stems just from childhood and the way that we’re kind of taught to think about our futures.

Miller: What about the age range of your audience? You mentioned a favorite recent guest who was in her 80s. Do you have a sense for the demographics?

Myers : Yeah. It’s probably no surprise. It’s around the time a woman would really consider having a child. So mid-20s to mid-40s is really our major demographic, skewing a little bit more towards the millennial age.

Abdelatif: Yeah.

Miller: There are plenty of podcasts devoted to parenting. And those podcasters, they read a ton of ads supporting their content. A lot of it, connected to the content itself – you’re busy people; here’s a product that can help you. Have you run into issues with advertisers where companies want the listeners that you have, but are skittish about being associated with a childfree life?

Myers: I love this question. Thank you for asking it. Yes, is the short answer. We do, like we said, have a big audience on social media. A lot of people with our same following size have no problems having advertisers support them. We have encountered a lot of pushback, in that people don’t want to associate themselves with childfree because they don’t want to polarize their parent audience. So, it is …

Miller: So in a way that associating themselves with a parenting audience, they don’t see in the same way, they don’t see the flip version of that, that could be, itself, polarizing?

Abdelatif: Yeah.

Myers : Right.

Miller: Without naming names, unless you want to, what have you heard? And how could there be an advertising spot on your podcast for a product that doesn’t somehow tie into the podcast itself?

Myers: Yeah. So it is interesting, because I’ll just reinforce this point, that typically when you think of a DINK, they have more disposable income. So you actually think that our audience would be ripe for advertisers, right? Oh, I forgot my train of thought ... where were we? [Laughter]

Abdelatif: I mean, I think generally speaking, some estimates suggest that up to a quarter of adults are actually childfree as opposed to just childless, like not wanting kids. So that’s a huge demographic of people that could be marketed to. So it’s fascinating to me that it’s not more of an interest, but I think from my POV – and Kristen, I’m curious to hear what you’re about to say – it’s just like, people don’t want to take the risk of maybe isolating a certain demographic of people. And because it’s not so normalized in society yet, there’s a lot of fear about even taking that step. So I think, for us, it’s like not even so much people saying no, it’s like people not even opening the door to take the conversation.

Myers: And I will say, what I was trying to say earlier, was that we have a friend and another social media influencer who is childfree by choice. Her name is Danni Duncan, I highly recommend her. And she has had contracts with advertisers who, when she submitted a draft for review, which included her opening the video with “I’m Danny Duncan, I’m childfree by choice,” and just going about her life – that was like one mention of not having kids – the advertisers have pulled back on the contract and removed her opportunities. Which goes in the tens of thousands of dollars sometimes for these advertisers.

So we’ve kept a pretty low profile in terms of reaching out to advertisers, and we focus on folks that we know are childfree or support childfree groups. And, right now, we’ve just started a patreon with our audience too, because our audience wants to give us money in the face of knowing that advertisers are less likely to.

Miller: That reminds me that you organized a trip to Switzerland over the summer for listeners. What was that trip like?

Abdelatif: It was healing. Like no joke. We both were very nervous going into it because we were like, what is this going to be? We’re with a group of fans, like is this going to be awkward?

Myers: Twenty women.

Abdelatif: Is it gonna be a lot – 20 women that we’ve never met? That’s a big ask. But we were, first of all, very surprised by how similar everyone was. Like, we connected almost immediately. And then on top of that, I think it was just really a huge weight off of our shoulders to be able to go into a room and talk to all of these women who have similar perspectives on life, similar ways of interacting with the world, similar dreams and aspirations, and to feel like you don’t have to censor yourself or maybe step on someone’s toes.

By the end of the trip, we had a goodbye dinner and all 20 of us were just like weeping. We’ve stayed in contact since then with the group. And yeah, it just was really, really profound to have that experience because it’s something that neither of us has ever experienced before.

Miller: It’s interesting hearing you say that, because I had been wondering … and this maybe gets to what you were talking about earlier, in terms of what is normalized in society and what’s not. I have kids and I had been thinking, if I went on some event or a long trip, a couple of days with people, and the organizing principle was all of them also had kids, I feel like I would have nothing in common with them. To me, it’s not an organizing principle. They were just strangers who, like me, have reproduced. But there’s a random chance that I would vibe with any of them.

And one big difference here is, as you said, these are fans of yours. So they listen to your voices, they hear your stories, they sort of have a parasocial relationship with you. They like you; you have to figure out if you like them. So that is different than just a random assortment of people who also don’t have kids but haven’t ever heard your voices.

But it’s interesting the way you describe this, that, as you said, for the first time in your life, you didn’t have to sensor yourselves. You could just be who you are. Kristen, maybe you could take this one – what’s an example of the freedom you felt there, that you don’t feel like you necessarily have in other circumstances?

Myers : Oh yeah. So I will say, just because a group of childfree women got together … I mean, we weren’t talking about not having kids the entire time.

Miller: I would imagine you wouldn’t because, I mean, life goes on. There’s other things to talk about.

Myers: Yeah. And there were a lot of similarities in our group, like Erika mentioned, just in terms of personality. But also, career-wise, there were a lot of folks who work in healthcare …

Abdelatif: Teachers.

Myers: People who are dedicating their lives to giving back to their, for the community.

But I will say, when you’re surrounded by mostly women my age – millennial age and my now almost late-30s, I guess you could say 37 – I’m constantly tiptoeing around not offending anybody, especially when it comes to like you had alluded to earlier. There’s a lot of things about the state of the world right now that give me pause and concern, quite frankly, for bringing a child into this state of the world. We talk about climate change, we talk about the political arena right now. We actually started our podcast within a couple of weeks of Roe v. Wade being overturned. So, I always want to celebrate with my friends who are having kids because that’s what they want, but it’s also nice to be able to share those concerns with other folks who get it, without fear of making them uncomfortable.

Abdelatif: Yeah.

Miller: I want to turn to politics squarely. Because I can’t remember a time in my life when being childfree entered the political discourse in the way that it did over the summer, when comments from JD Vance – obviously, then vice presidential candidate, now vice president-elect – were unearthed. What’s it been like to have such a public platform at this time? Erika, maybe you can take this first.

Abdelatif: I mean, if I can be frank ...

Miller: Please.

Abdelatif: It’s terrifying. We have a funny podcast, but we’re genuinely afraid to have this platform. When you look at what’s happening around the world – Russia just banned childfree propaganda. And I think that there’s a push towards authoritarianism happening in our world. We see what’s happening here with a potential national abortion ban in play. Like we said, Roe v. Wade has been overturned. And so we have these very serious rights that have already been kind of taken off the table, and who knows where that’s gonna go. To have somebody, a lot of people … I mean, Elon Musk, who’s very close with the administration, is also very into pro-natalist perspectives.

Miller: Even joking in ways that that are the epitome of rape culture, jokes about baby making.

Abdelatif: Right. Yeah, I mean, there was a YouTube influencer who recently said, “Your body, my choice.” So it’s scary to have a platform right now, where you’re encouraging women to think for themselves and to have a choice in what their life looks like, when so many men want to use physical force or laws to enforce what you do with your life.

So, yeah, we are afraid. But I think, at the end of the day, we recognize that this is such an important conversation. Women have fought so hard, for so long for their rights. So, in a lot of ways, it feels like our work, even though we’re kind of two silly billies [laughter]. It’s really important. It’s important for women to be having these conversations, especially in a place where you have joy and fun.

Myers : We are not shying away from the conversation on our podcast or on social media. I’ll say it that way.

Miller: Kristen, has your understanding of your job or your project changed? Has it evolved in the last two years?

Myers : Oh, yeah, especially when we talk about politics, right? Just using that as an example, I have been well known on the podcast to shy away from those topics because I didn’t want to polarize folks. I didn’t want to stir the pot. And I didn’t honestly believe that another Trump presidency was imminent. I really thought that that was behind us. So I didn’t want to bring that up again. But obviously now, given the face of the new administration coming in and also Project 2025 – however real that actually becomes – we’ve actually started doing episodes directly on those topics. So I think my perspective has shifted over the last couple of years, particularly in light of the recent administration.

Miller: Kristen Myers and Erika Abdelatif, thanks very much.

Abdelatif / Myers: Thank you.

Miller: Kristen Myers and Erika Abdelatif are college best friends, who are now the co-hosts of the podcast “Dinky.”

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