Why has the birth rate cratered in the “developed world” including, quite recently, the United States? The standard answer includes a heavy dose of “children used to contribute to the family’s financial well-being, as farmworkers and future caretakers in old age, now they are just a costly burden.” Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, herself the mother of 8 and also a business professor, sought to find an answer by looking at the other side of the coin: women who make the intentional choice to have large families. Her approach was to seek out women across the country with 5 or more children, who were American born and college-educated, so that they had to go against the grain, that is, they faced the conflict of childbirth and career advancement more directly than those without that degree. Altogether she and her co-researchers conducted 55 interviews, and these are the heart of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.
Here’s the bottom-line-on-top version: among these women, the trade-off that women generally experience, which for many is becoming insurmountable, that each additional child means greater sacrifices in terms of family finances, career, travel, entertainment, etc., with diminishing rewards, is not present for these women. Instead, each additional child means less marginal cost and greater marginal benefits — that these mothers, and their families, don’t perceive of the love they have for their children to be finite and spread too thin, but instead, they feel that the joy and satisfaction they experience (and that of their husbands and children) only increases.
If the real cost of a child is what you give up to have one, that cost decreases with additional children after two or three. . . . The total cost to a woman’s identity, status, and lifestyle of having more than an average-sized family was counted as huge by the women in my sample — but the marginal costs diminished.
At the same time, we heard a story of increasing marginal benefits with more children. The rough idea was that the joy of an additional child reverberated among all the members of the family, especially when the older kids reached early teenage years and beyond. With more kids, there were more people to have and share the joy. This fact, superadded to their baseline reasons to keep going, meant that the marginal value they attached to having a child actually increased with more children. For them, children weren’t like a consumption good with diminishing satisfaction. Women frequently reported enjoying their fourth, fifth, and sixth babies more than their firsts and seconds — as incredible as that may sound. (p. 149).
This sounds right to me, at least from my experience as a mother of three — the more kids, the more confidence you have, and it’s a game-changer when the older children can help with the younger ones. She also writes that this is not something those older children experience as a burden, but they enjoy the little ones and the experience as “older children in large families” enables them to grow into more well-adjusted adults than responsibility-free children of small families.
Who are these women? They are Jews, or Mormons, or Catholics or conservative Protestants. Some felt called from childhood to have large families, others had a conversion experience, others found there way into large-family-hood more “accidentally” simply by having one child, then another, and enjoying parenting so much they wanted to keep going. In some cases, there was a definite, “the purpose of marriage is to have as many children as God gives you,” but this was mixed with a more typical belief in discernment of God’s will for their particular situaton, paired with, as any one child got into toddlerhood, a feeling of readiness for another one. And, to be sure, the interviewees ranged from 5 children to 12; these were not all “mega-families.”
These women were also quite keenly aware of what they left behind. Several maintained careers, one a professor, another a pediatrician (with a stay-at-home husband), though most left behind careers or the prospect of careers, which are for so many of us the source of our identity, but they believed that the financial sacrifice was, once accepted, not a big loss, and that benefits were worth the cost. As one mother expressed it, “it gives us structure and allows us to grow and feel connected to something higher than ourselves” (p. 168).
In several instances, touchingly, the interviewees also raised dimensions the interviewers hadn’t even considered: having a baby provided healing for a father or an older sibling experiencing anxiety or depression or recovery from grief.
So what does this book reveal about the various efforts undertaken in one country after another to boost the birth rate by means of increasing maternity leave or day care subsidies or cash benefits for parents? Pakaluk doesn’t believe this will have an impact. The decision to parent isn’t made (or not made) for financial reasons. It’s social, it’s cultural, it’s, as she phrases it, “reasons of the heart” — and these are ultimately driven by religious belief, so that the best way to encourage more children is to strengthen religion — though by then she’s on the last two pages of the book so doesn’t really have much in the way of concrete suggestions on how to accomplish that.
What’s more, in the end these are 55 interviews with women who responded to requests. It’s not a random sample, and it likely misses women who are unhappy with the path they ended up on. Perhaps those women are few in number, but we don’t really know.
Finally, there is a hole in the narrative: while religious belief is a key part of these women’s lives, there are certainly many observant Jewish, Mormon, Catholic or conservative Protestant women who have “normal” levels of children. I did not finish the book with a clear picture of what the secret sauce is that led these women down the path the others didn’t follow. For example, some of these women grew up in large families so that it was naturally to do the same; but there are many women who grew up in large families and did not follow this path. What’s the difference. Inquiring minds want to know.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In