Birth rates have been falling here in the U.S. and around the world for a long time. With all of the modern day challenges of having kids, from budget to lack of government support, it makes sense.
But Catherine Pakaluk — an economist at Catholic University of America, author of the new book “Hannah’s Children” and a mother of eight herself — says it’s not true for everyone.
Pakaluk talked to 55 college-educated women who have five or more children to try to find out why. They represent about 5% of the population, and she told me their stories point to broader questions about meaning and identity in having kids.
Full conversation
CATHERINE PAKALUK: This was a really important group to study because with the falling birth rates all around the world, there's a really important question that policymakers are asking, which is, you know, is there anything we can do about this decline in fertility?
And so one of the interesting questions is like, who doesn't fit this trend? Who looks different? And so, going around and talking to people and figuring out like, “what makes you tick? Why would you do this?” This is a really important piece of the story.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK, so we're gonna dig into that more. But talk first about some of those misconceptions, and I'm completely guilty of this as well. I have little kids, like I'm around other mothers and other families a lot, and once in a while you'll see a family with a bunch of kids like this, and I'll always kind of wonder like, why? So do they feel judged? Like what kinds of misconceptions do people have?
PAKALUK: Yeah, for sure. They do feel judged. It turned out that that was a really common theme. People look at larger families and they tend to think either, you know, didn't have any other options in life, like that was just that was the best thing they could come up with to do, didn't want to work, didn't have a job or career. Or they think, you know, ignorant, don't know how this works.
Women, women get that question all the time in public. Like, don't you know how this happens? Which is, you know, kind of funny if it's said in one way, but also, you know, can be a little insulting if you hear it over and over, you know, don't you know how children happen? And then, you know, maybe the last, the last like misconception that people get a lot, a lot, a lot is sort of, are you against family planning, are people who have lots of kids so sort of again, the modern world, like their Amish or something, right? That kind of idea. So I think those are all, you know, things that I think are misconceptions, but people get them all the time.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. And talk about some of the women you talked to 55 women here, college-educated women who chose these larger families. You are among these women, I should say.
PAKALUK: Yes.
GILGER: And, and they talked about these misconceptions, I'm sure about, about this feeling of judgment, but none of that really turned out to be true.
PAKALUK: Right, of course, you know, everybody's story is a little bit different, but the misconceptions aren't true. These are women who some of them are full-time work, some of them are doing part-time work, some of them used to work full time and don't now. All kinds of different varieties of things. Different religious faiths, but certainly not a, not a kind of theme of rejecting the modern world, now people who are like living under a rock or didn't want to modernize or drive cars or something like that. So yeah, they, you know, in a sense, like if you met them without their children in public, most of the people I talked to, I think would just strike you as sort of ordinary people.
GILGER: Let me ask you about the broader context you brought up there, which is, is this idea that we are, in fact, at this moment seeing birth rates fall dramatically. This has been happening for a long time in our country. It's happening even more dramatically in some other countries around the world.
And and it makes sense in lots of ways, right? Like we don't have social supports for families. We don't often have parental leave when people have kids. Like women also just have more options than they used to have. I wonder what did the people that you interviewed about this have to say about why they did this?
PAKALUK: You know, obviously, all the things that you just mentioned, I think are really important and part of the conversation about falling birth rates. This is one of the reasons economists think more or less, you know, these birth rates have been falling, as you say, for a really long time. This isn't just something that happened since the Great Recession, or even something that happened, you know, in the last, you know, 20 or 30 years, but it's, it's a couple of 100 years.
And the way to think about it is children aren't needed anymore. Like you can live a complete, happy life without children. In the past, that would have been difficult, not merely because of social norms or expectations, but actually, more importantly, sort of for labor, for help around the house, for domestic chores, for support in your old age, right? I mean, those are all things you couldn't have taken for granted without children in your life.
And so when, you know, when you think about human decision making, we do things because we need them or because we want them. And so then if children aren't needed as much, then the really interesting thing is, well, who wants them? Like, and why did they want them? And what are the kinds of things that could motivate you to want them?
And this is where, in my data, what emerged was kind of a, a layered picture. But one of the really important themes was this idea of biblical faith, a kind of, maybe a traditional kind of biblical faith that says children are really blessings in your life. And a blessing is the sort of thing that you wouldn't just want to have once. You know, if you'd be blessed, you'd like to be blessed more than once.
Women who describe their children as blessings in that biblical way, we're kind of like, well, it, you know, all things being equal, if my health is good, if our resources are good, why wouldn't we have the next one? And I think that's really different. I think that's a really interesting phenomenon. And it certainly opened my eyes to a, a broad spectrum of women of different faiths who shared that central idea about children.
GILGER: Was it often about faith for, for most of these women?
PAKALUK: Yes. Well, it was about 95% of my sample was about faith, or at least I would say it was drawn from faith. I like to say it was kind of drawn from faith. One woman said it was kind of underneath her religion or her kind of coming, like at this basis. Many women shared being drawn to particular churches because in a sense, they had this almost visceral sense that childbearing was so important.
And that they really gravitated towards churches that celebrated the intrinsic goodness of children and childbearing, because of course they did draw a lot of social support from their church networks and, and friends.
GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you about your own story here and your own personal experience in this. I mentioned you are also a mother of eight. I'm sure that is probably part of what sparked your interest in this, right? But how did your own experience play into reporting this and, and your motivation?
PAKALUK: Yeah, well, you know, as I was kind of thinking about what I could add as a scholar and a researcher to this puzzle, right? Because it is, it has been a real puzzle for demographers to think about how low can birth rates go and why are they going quite so low. I was thinking, what can I bring to the table? And, you know, we have this persistent truth in the social sciences, which is that if you're going to interview people, it's, it's vastly better to bring a team of interviewers who are able to be received without judgment.
I mean, so that, you know, so you kind of walking in. It's like, “look, I'm not judging you. I've made the same life choices. I don't know how to perfectly describe why I did this, but boy, you know, your children are great. Tell me about it.”
So, so I thought like, well, this is a comparative advantage that I have. So I thought, OK, I could do this. This will be really interesting, and let's see what we find. Yeah.
GILGER: Yeah. So what you're getting at here in the book is also larger, right? Like it's looking at this economic question, right, which is kind of your specialty, about the future of American prosperity, what it means that birth rates are so low, what it means for the future of our country. Should we assume that this is a bad thing? That birth rates going down will negatively affect at least economically, our country's future?
PAKALUK: So I'll say this. I'll say economists are in uncharted territory on that. Most people do assume it's a bad thing. Most of the economists, demographers, political scientists assume it's a bad thing. We don't think you can have sustained economic growth with a declining working population.
I want to really stress our working population is already declining. Not only are your welfare programs stressed, and you know, it's much harder for us to, to think about carving up tax payments from current workers to pay for so many retired workers, but, you know, we don't think you can have prolonged economic growth and prosperity with a shrinking workforce since all the countries in the world are converging very rapidly to the same demographic patterns we have here.
You know, there, there's no like immigration story that changes this. So it, you know, it's probably gonna be a bad thing, but I also want to say, we have no data on this, right? Never happened. It's never happened.
