Are Marriage and Parenthood Still Worth It? A Millennial Dad’s Honest Take

Why are so many young adults choosing to delay — or completely opt out of — marriage and parenthood? In this week’s episode of TUF, I dig into the shifting values around the American Dream: white picket fence, marriage, kids, career… and whether it still holds up in 2025.

As a millennial dad who did get married and did have kids — later than some, earlier than others — I share my personal journey, the challenges of modern parenting, and how becoming a parent forced me to grow. We dive into:

• Why younger generations are rethinking marriage
• The rise of the “DINK” (dual income, no kids) lifestyle
• Economic pressures making family life harder to access
• How fertility struggles impacted our family planning
• Redefining success and purpose in a child-free world
• The value of generational healing through intentional parenting

Whether you’re in your 20s, 30s, or beyond — thinking about starting a family, or actively avoiding it — this conversation is about what it means to build a meaningful life in today’s world.

💬 Where do you stand? Did you delay starting a family? Do you see marriage as outdated or essential? Drop your thoughts in the comments or send me a message — I want to hear from you.

#MillennialParenting #MarriageIn2025 #DelayedParenthood #ChildFreeByChoice #ModernFatherhood #FamilyPlanning #ParentingPodcast #DINKLifestyle #ParentingIn2025 #UnhingedFather

Chapters

• 0:00 The Changing Landscape of Family and Marriage
• 3:15 Delaying Parenthood: Personal Experiences and Insight
• 5:52 The Financial Burden of Raising Children
• 8:26 Redefining Marriage and Family Dynamics
• 11:00 The Purpose of Family in Society
• 16:02 Breaking Generational Trauma and Redefining Success
• 20:57 Encouraging Family Growth in Modern Society

Transcript

Meta Description (for Google + Podcast Apps)

In this episode, Robert dives deep into shifting generational values around marriage, kids, and the American dream. He explores fertility, finances, and societal pressure in a raw, personal conversation. Read or listen now.

• why millennials aren’t having kids
• delaying marriage and parenthood
• American dream generational change
• cost of raising children 2025
• family planning in modern society
• dink lifestyle (dual income no kids)

Summary:

What does it mean to have a family in 2025? In this episode, Robert opens up about marriage, kids, and how the American Dream is being redefined by millennials and younger generations. He talks candidly about fertility challenges, the cost of childcare, the emotional growth that comes with parenting, and why some people are choosing the DINK lifestyle—dual income, no kids. It’s a passionate take on personal responsibility, societal shifts, and why the traditional family unit might still matter.

Whether you’re planning a family, questioning it, or just curious about how our culture is shifting, this episode is full of grounded thoughts, hot takes, and real vulnerability.

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Full Podcast Transcript

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Robert (00:00)

All right, everyone, welcome to the show. Hope you're all in a fantastic day, having a great week. ⁓ Let's go ahead and jump into this episode. I've got a lot of stuff that I wanted to talk about today. And it's a topic that shouldn't surprise anyone, but it's kind of a broad topic and I'm gonna narrow it down into a couple of different fields. But what I wanted to talk about today was just the whole concept of having kids, getting married, the American dream, right? The white picket fence, the dog, the two kids.

All that stuff, seems like it's really changing, especially with the younger generations, my generation, which is, we're not the younger generation anymore. Sorry to all you millennials out there. You're old as fuck now. I'm old. My knees hurt, my back hurts. Everything hurts. We're not the younger generation. I don't even know what the new generations are. It stops at Gen Z. I don't know what goes after that one, but I'm sure that I'll find out eventually when my kids ⁓ start telling me what their generation is.

Anyways, I actually asked ChatGPT to help me out with coming up with a topic for today's episode. I was kind of drawing a little bit of a blank and I was like, hey, what are some things that are going on that people are talking about? And this was one of the ones that popped up, just the delay in life of having a family, having kids and the conscious decision of certain people to not have kids, to not wanna have a family, to just go through life.

Independent and for the different reasons that they may have and that's what I wanted to dive in today Just some of that thought processes how I perceive it what my thoughts are on having a family having kids as someone who does have that and Just I guess purpose in life Just you know that light stuff. Nothing too. Nothing too heavy here

Now, one thing that I've seen and a lot of people I think have seen and I think I'm included in this because I actually did delay, me and my wife, we delayed having a family. My wife went to a certain schooling for her career. She got established in her career before we went ahead and had kids. Now, we did get married relatively young, 24, which I don't think is young for older generations, but for the millennials, 24, man, we were...

We were basically babies when we got married, fresh out of college essentially. And that was good for us. We went through some ups and downs and there were definitely hard times when she was in graduate school and she wasn't making any money. I was working full-time. was my transition to being a full-time career employee somewhere and having additional responsibilities, being outside of the college life and having to actually adult as the kids may say nowadays. And so we went through.

a lot of ups, a lot of downs, and we did a lot of growing, and it was difficult. There were a lot of hard times, and I'm sure that my wife can speak on this as well, that we had to grow and learn through. And I mentioned in previous episodes that I'm not always super proud of the person that I used to be. I think that I've done a lot of growing since then, and part of what forced me to grow

is having kids, having children, having a family forced me to become the man that I am today.

But every person's different. Every family is different. They're gonna choose a different time to have kids, to have a family, or to potentially not have any family whatsoever.

And that's okay. You can delay having kids. You can delay having a family. You can delay some of those responsibilities if you want to get emotionally ready for it, if you want to get financially prepared for it. But what I will say to that effect is don't wait too long. And you're never going to be fully ready for it. That's never going to happen. We weren't fully ready when we had kids. And as we got older,

We started to have our kids and we're lucky we have two right now and I'm not gonna get deep into this in this message but one of the reasons why I say not to wait too long is because We now know that we have issues Getting pregnant we've had to go through some fertility issues and we've had to go through miscarriages and there's a lot of things that have prevented us from getting to where we're at and God willing we will hopefully have add one more

child to this little collection of this ensemble of children that we already have. But it's been difficult and we're getting older. We're not young. Thirty seven years old, basically geriatric parents at this point in time. And you don't want to wait too long to where you find out you've got something like this and you miss that opportunity. We're lucky we didn't miss the opportunity. We still have two healthy, beautiful boys. But if if we would have started earlier, we could have potentially. Known that we had these issues and.

address them earlier in life when we don't already have ages, ages now against us. We're we're at a point where it's harder without any fertility issues to get pregnant at this age. So it's just something that I think about and it's not something that I regret, but it's just something to think about if you are looking towards having a family, if you want to have kids, if you want to grow your family, I would suggest having that conversation on don't wait too long.

Don't wait too long to where something comes in the way and you miss that opportunity.

And some people are choosing not to have kids at all. Some people are choosing to live that, what's it called? ⁓

Dink, the dink life, we've talked about it before, the dual income, no kids. And that's an option as well. I'll dive a little bit deeper into that later in the episode on my thoughts on that. But personally, if you don't wanna have kids, maybe not everyone is built to be a parent. To me, it's kind of a shallow, it seems like more of a shallow existence. And I'm biased, I'm a parent. And I may not have thought this before I had kids. I may not have thought.

that living that life without having the responsibilities of these little life forms that follow you around everywhere, poop, pee, eat, cost you a ton of money. I may not have thought that, like, I may have thought like, it's great, I get to sleep in whenever I want, I only have to worry about myself. But as I look back now, having these responsibilities, even though it's an additional work on my shoulders, additional work on my wife's shoulders, I couldn't imagine not having them around.

It's just not even comprehensible to me to not have these around him. And like I said, it pushed me to become a better person in a lot of aspects of my life.

And I think part of the reason why some people may choose to go this no children, no family life, or even delay part of the delay that they may have in having kids is just because it's expensive as fuck to have kids. There's no getting around it. as I've gotten older and older, I've looked at different finances and stuff like that. You always look back at the older generations and they talk about how like, well, we worked hard, we did this and

I get both sides of the argument. I get the younger generation sometimes are whiny little wimps about a bunch of shit. And then you also have the older people that don't realize that things were actually a lot cheaper when they were around. They could work minimum wage jobs or jobs that paid less than what they do now, but not comparable to what the inflation and what the cost of everything is now. The cost of a house, the cost of an education.

the cost of childcare, all of these things are just exponentially higher than what they were then and the salaries haven't kept up with that, unfortunately. And I know having to put kids in daycare, having to put kids with nannies, having to pay for that shit, I understand now why.

there used to be this dynamic where one parent would stay home. In our household, it would be great if one of the parents was able to stay home and take care of the kids and save on the cost of childcare, because it is just so damn expensive, especially in the state of California.

And for us, we need two incomes in order to maintain our lifestyle, but sometimes it feels like one of us is just working in order to pay for childcare and to pay for taxes. Like that's essentially where all of our money is going. It's like one of us works so we can afford taxes and childcare, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Tax is a whole different issue. I'll get into that in a different episode, but God, I hate taxes.

So that's something that maybe we as a society need to look into. If we want people to have more kids,

If we want the human race to move forward and to procreate and to flourish, maybe this is something that we as a society need to help encourage. Something that we need to look at and changes we need to make as a society, as a culture, in order to make it more feasible for people to have kids. Maybe that's why some of these younger generations are deciding not to have kids or delay having children, because they're afraid of the financial consequences. Some of them may...

not have a job fresh out of college. Some of them may still be living with their parents, right? There's all these things that have come into play that may prevent someone from trying to have their own family. And so these are things that we as society should look into and try to figure out what can we do to help foster an environment where people wanna have families, wanna have kids.

I think there's another thing that popped up within good old chat GPT telling me what people are talking about. Appreciate it since I don't always have my thumb to the pulse of culture nowadays is that there's also this changing view on marriage.

A lot of people come from broken homes, from broken marriages, from potentially unhappy marriages. And I myself come from a marriage that didn't last. I was in college when my parents split, but I do come from a home that ended in divorce. this is one of the things that I think that we should be looking at as well.

Is there this redefinition of marriage? Are younger generations seeing all of the trauma and the issues that have happened with marriages in the past and how most of them, not most of them, but a lot of them are ending in divorce and the issues that that's causing as well. Are these causing younger generations to maybe be like, I don't want to get into marriage. Is marriage becoming obsolete?

Is it worth getting married to someone in order to start a family? Can I have an alternative lifestyle where I'm not necessarily married, but I still start a family with someone? And my opinion on this is, well, it's in the gray area, right? I'm not here to shit on people for living the life that they want to live. Me personally, I think that marriage is definitely still worth it. And I look at part of the problem is the fact that people don't, in marriages, don't always talk. they always, it's always just like,

I don't know, it's almost like hustle culture that we have in America where you're always looking for the next thing, the best thing, what can I do that's better, as opposed to being appreciative for what you already have. And social media has like tripled, quadrupled, whatever, fucking times a hundred. It has exponentially changed how we look at things and how we appreciate things because you always see someone else who's got more, better, they've got a better husband, they've got a better wife.

They make more money. There's so many comparisons now. And I think that that's had a huge negative impact on marriage, which didn't need another attack on it. There were already issues from the 50s, 60s, 70s, just the way that there was the dynamic between the husband and the wife and potentially unhappiness in the marriage and just unequal treatment of men and women in those days. Like I think that that had a lot to do with some of the unhappiness or even just like

people rushing into marriage because they got pregnant or rushing into marriage because that's what they thought they had to do. I'm not for any of that stuff. What I'm for is finding the person that you wanna be with, that you're meant to be with, committing to them, and then holding true to that commitment. I'm not sitting here with rose colored glasses and thinking that divorce will never happen and there's never a situation where someone should get out of a marriage, but I do think that people give up too easily now.

And it's on both, it's on the women and the men. The men are typically the ones who are like, I'm not going to counseling, I'm not doing this, I'm doing everything fine, I'm going to work. All that bullshit. The men need to...

stop being whiny little wimps and realize that they need to make changes as well. They're not perfect. They need to be able to talk about their feelings, talk about certain things, have these conversations with their wives, with their spouses, with their family. And that sometimes being vulnerable is a good thing. Going to counseling, admitting that there's something wrong. If you just like try to brush everything under a rug, it's going to make everything worse. So you need to be able to have these conversations. And on the flip side,

This is, I'm speaking in generalities here, but from what I can see or what I've seen in the past is that like you'll have the women who just see these other comparisons and they compare, you'll get, I see on social media now people are like, I'm a divorce coach. Like what the fuck is a divorce coach? Why is that even a fucking thing? That's just terrible. Or you'll see women.

compared to like other husbands, like, this husband does all this stuff and they work and they take care of the kids. They do all this stuff. My husband doesn't do that. Like I should get a divorce and find someone better. The comparisons are a marriage killer and both partners need to be on the same page, communicate, and both need to give each other the benefit of the doubt that they're both working as hard as they can to create a good family environment.

Now, and both of them should be working as hard as they can to create a good working, a good working family environment. That being said, it's not always gonna be equal. Equality doesn't always exist. There are gonna be times where one partner is holding up more of the responsibilities and the support and the other one may need more support. And there's gonna be a flip in that, right? There's gonna be another time where maybe the other spouse is holding up more at that time. And it's a give and take and it's a bounce.

and you should have a conversation regarding that. But all I know is that in my marriage, when I said, till death do me part, I wasn't fucking joking around. That's what I said, till death do us part. And that's what I plan on doing. And a joke I always have is when people ask me, what's the secret to a long marriage? Which it's sad to say, me and my wife, we're coming up on 13 years within our friends groups, we're the long marriage.

We're basically in our golden years when it comes to some of the other people that we went to college with.

And I always say, being stubborn. Being stubborn is the key to a happy marriage. You need to be stubborn and not in the way you might think where you're just like, know, fuck it, I'm not doing, you need to be so stubborn that you're willing to do whatever it takes to make your marriage work. Stubborn in the fact that you may need to go to therapy. Stubborn in the fact that you may have to do more in the relationship at a certain point in time in order to make things work.

stubborn that you may need to swallow your fucking pride and give in to certain negotiations to continue the marriage going forward. And this is for both sides. This is not just for the husbands. This is for both sides of the marriage.

Be unwaveringly stubborn, but not in the way that you would think. Not stubborn in the like, I'm gonna close off, it's my way or the highway. Be so stubborn about continuing to be married that you're willing to do whatever it takes.

And in the words of Forrest Gump, that's all I got to say about that.

And that might be one of the reasons why people are avoiding family, having kids, all that stuff. could be that fear of divorce. They come from a broken home, like I said. But another thing that, and this is getting more towards the ding point. And another point that came up was just people are starting to redefine what success means and what their purpose is in, in writing in this without having kids, without having a family. And to me, this is one I might, I might sound.

stubborn, old school, whatever the fuck you want to say in this thought process. But I was thinking about it more deeply and some people were like, well, I don't want to have kids because I want to make a bunch of money or I want to pursue my career. I want to cure cancer. I want to feed the hungry. want to whatever it is, whatever your purpose is. And this kind of brings me back to ⁓ what is it? I think it's Victor Frankl's

search for meaning or I can't remember exactly what the book name is, but essentially it's all about how human beings need to have meaning, need to have purpose in order to feel fulfilled in life. And they need to find out what that purpose and that meaning is. And to me, if we get to a point in society where having a family procreating, passing along our genes, making sure that the human race continues to

be in existence down the road, there is no purpose to anything else. What happens if you find out the cure for cancer, but we're not gonna be around as a race down the road? Who gives a shit? We're gonna be gone anyways. There is no purpose in curing cancer. There is no purpose in feeding the hungry. There is no purpose in doing all of these amazing things that people are focusing on if the human race isn't gonna be around. If we're not here,

If we don't have kids, if we don't continue our genes, our family lines, if we don't continue all of that stuff, then what is the point of, like I said, curing cancer, great example, or curing dementia, or curing Alzheimer's, or I don't know, any of the other things that we're doing that are helpful to human beings. Sure, maybe you're curing short-term pain, or like in the immediate present, you're...

curing certain things or you're helping whatever it is. But down the road, it becomes meaningless. humans are no longer around, this work that people are doing becomes meaningless. And so I think that that's something that we need to wrap our heads around. And this isn't to say that everyone needs to have kids.

I do think that one of life's greatest tasks for us as human beings is to procreate, to have kids, pass along our genes, pass along our family line, and to help the human race to continue on down the road. It's like that for every other animal. And some people might say we're not animals, but we are. We're animals. And what is every animal's main goal? It's to continue on.

with their species to make sure that it goes into the future and that they do their part in furthering their line, right?

So that was just something that I had. was something that came up with me when it came to redefining success and people focusing more on making money and doing all that stuff. And maybe they, they do just want to like live a lush life, have money to travel, and they're really focused on themselves. They're not focused on anything else. They don't care about the human race, all that. Fine. That's fine if you want to do that. But to me, that's more of a shallow existence. It's a selfish selfish existence. And

one of the defining definitions of being a good parent, because some people may have kids and not be a good parent, but one of the characteristics of a good parent is that they are unselfish, that they are giving of themselves, and that they are willing to do things that are in the best interest of their kids that may be difficult for them. They may be hard for them to do. They may even be self-deprecating, because they're willing to do that in order to ensure that their kids have a good life, that they raise their kids right.

that their kids are able to move forward and then do their task of helping progress the human race.

And there's the opposite side of this too. I've talked about a lot of the negative aspects of people not necessarily wanting to become parents, but a positive aspect of what people may be doing now, younger generations, if they do choose to have families, is to change things, right? Maybe they came from a broken home. Maybe they came from a...

an environment where they were abused or they didn't have a great family life.

people can now get into like having a family and making changes that they wanna see. Hopefully breaking generational trauma, which I believe in. I'm someone who lives on both sides of the lines when it comes to old school, new school. We've talked about that a lot.

But I do think that you can change things. And that's not to say that the parents of old were terrible and that they all were fucked up and everything they did was wrong. No, I'm sure a lot of them did the best that they could. But one of the things that we should be trying to do as human beings in general is to progress, to get better, to be better than the people before us. Not progress for progress's sake, but in order to actually create meaningful change that's gonna help us. And I think that

becoming a parent now, some of the younger generations can break some of that generational trauma. They can be better parents. They can be involved. They can be emotionally intelligent. They can change the way that they parent in order to try and be the best parents they can be to their kids, to make sure that they're leaving a lasting impact in this world by raising their kids in a certain way and trying to have them pass that along. So that way our kids

can emulate like us and they're gonna change stuff, they're gonna progress, they're gonna try and make things better. And like with every generations, they're probably gonna change stuff for the better and they're probably gonna fuck stuff up. Just like we're probably changing stuff for the better but we're also probably fucking stuff up. It's gonna happen. But we just are constantly in this give and take and being a human being, having a family, it's messy. Being a human being is messy, it's not perfect.

And we just have to continue down this path. And I think that that's another reason that the younger generations should have have families, should have kids. The family, in my opinion, is a core unit in society. And I think that it's something that should be celebrated,

should be encouraged and something that we as society should look at the systems we have in place and make sure that having a good family unit is possible. We've gone to a lot of like government assistance and we're looking to make everyone's life better and all this stuff, but have we really made life easier for families? And I'm not gonna get into all the conspiracy theories or even just regular theories. They don't have to be conspiracies on how.

Sometimes the government may not want us to have these cohesive family units. How sometimes they've made it even harder because they want people to be more reliant on the government as opposed to being reliant on their own family, their own network, their own people. And I think that's something that we can look at. We should be looking at as a society, as a culture, as companies, as everything. We should be looking at how we can make

it possible to have families and to encourage the younger generations to move forward, to have families, to be able to feel good about that decision and to raise good ones because we need the human race to keep on moving forward.

So what about you? If you're listening to this, you might already have a family, did you delay? Did you delay having a family? Did you wait until you were older in your 30s, even your 40s to have kids? Did you, were you hesitant to get married because you've seen broken families or been a part of a broken family or just seen the trauma that can happen when a family is torn apart?

Where are you at on this debate? you a dink? Stupid fucking dinks. Just kidding. If you're a dink, we'll forgive you. We can't all be perfect. But I wanna know, where are you at right now? Did you delay? Are you in a family right now? What are your thoughts on some of this? Do you agree? Do you disagree? I'd really like to know what your opinion is on this, but I do think this is an important conversation to have. And I think that the core thing here is how can we as a society get back to making the family.

important? How can we get back to making sure that it's possible to have families, that there's not this financial burden that comes down on families, that everyone needs to work two jobs all the time or 10 jobs between both parents to get financially secure, to be able to have reliable housing, to have relatively inexpensive childcare? Like where are the things that we can do as a society, as a culture, as a government?

as corporations, what can we do to make it, I don't know, a comfy little nest, an area that promotes having a family and helping the human race move forward. So that's my question to you all today. Hope you all enjoyed the episode. I feel like a lot of questions and stuff in there, a little bit of a longer one, but hope everyone enjoyed it. Let me know your thoughts, send me an email, click the little button that says send a message to the show. And other than that,

Have a fantastic rest of the day. See y'all next week.