{"id":18937,"date":"2024-11-30T20:22:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T02:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=18937"},"modified":"2024-11-30T20:22:17","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T02:22:17","slug":"curing-the-birth-dearth-reading-hannahs-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2024\/11\/curing-the-birth-dearth-reading-hannahs-children.html","title":{"rendered":"Curing the Birth Dearth: Reading Hannah’s Children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"
from flickr, https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/davidswiftphotography\/2200020857; Creative Commons 2.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Why has the birth rate cratered in the \u201cdeveloped world\u201d including, quite recently, the United States?\u00a0 The standard answer includes a heavy dose of \u201cchildren used to contribute to the family\u2019s financial well-being, as farmworkers and future caretakers in old age, now they are just a costly burden.\u201d\u00a0 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:\u00a0 women who make the intentional choice to have large families.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Altogether she and her co-researchers conducted 55 interviews, and these are the heart of Hannah\u2019s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Instead, each additional child means less marginal cost and<\/strong><\/em> greater marginal benefits \u2014 that these mothers, and their families, don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s identity, status, and lifestyle of having more than an average-sized family was counted as huge by the women in my sample \u2014 but the marginal costs diminished.<\/p>\n

At the same time, we heard a story of increasing marginal benefits with more children.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With more kids, there were more people to have and share the joy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For them, children weren\u2019t like a consumption good with diminishing satisfaction.\u00a0 Women frequently reported enjoying their fourth, fifth, and sixth babies more than their firsts and seconds \u2014 as incredible as that may sound.\u00a0 (p. 149).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This sounds right to me, at least from my experience as a mother of three \u2014 the more kids, the more confidence you have, and it\u2019s a game-changer when the older children can help with the younger ones.\u00a0 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 \u201colder children in large families\u201d enables them to grow into more well-adjusted adults than responsibility-free children of small families.<\/p>\n

Who are these women?\u00a0 They are Jews, or Mormons<\/a>, or Catholics or conservative Protestants.\u00a0 Some felt called from childhood to have large families, others had a conversion experience, others found there way into large-family-hood more \u201caccidentally\u201d simply by having one child, then another, and enjoying parenting so much they wanted to keep going.\u00a0 In some cases, there was a definite, \u201cthe purpose of marriage is to have as many children as God gives you,\u201d but this was mixed with a more typical belief in discernment of God\u2019s will for their particular situaton, paired with, as any one child got into toddlerhood, a feeling of readiness for another one.\u00a0 \u00a0And, to be sure, the interviewees ranged from 5 children to 12; these were not all \u201cmega-families.\u201d<\/p>\n

These women were also quite keenly aware of what they left behind.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As one mother expressed it, \u201cit gives us structure and allows us to grow and feel connected to something higher than ourselves\u201d (p. 168).<\/p>\n

In several instances, touchingly, the interviewees also raised dimensions the interviewers hadn\u2019t even considered:\u00a0 having a baby provided healing for a father or an older sibling experiencing anxiety or depression or recovery from grief.<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0 Pakaluk doesn\u2019t believe this will have an impact.\u00a0 The decision to parent isn\u2019t made (or not made) for financial reasons. It\u2019s social, it\u2019s cultural, it\u2019s, as she phrases it, \u201creasons of the heart\u201d \u2014 and these are ultimately driven by religious belief, so that the best way to encourage more children is to strengthen religion \u2014 though by then she\u2019s on the last two pages of the book so doesn\u2019t really have much in the way of concrete suggestions on how to accomplish that.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, in the end these are 55 interviews with women who responded to requests.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a random sample, and it likely misses women who are unhappy with the path they ended up on.\u00a0 Perhaps those women are few in number, but we don\u2019t really know.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is a hole in the narrative:\u00a0 while religious belief is a key part of these women\u2019s lives, there are certainly many observant Jewish, Mormon, Catholic or conservative Protestant women who have \u201cnormal\u201d levels of children.\u00a0 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\u2019t follow.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What\u2019s the difference.\u00a0 Inquiring minds want to know.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why has the birth rate cratered in the \u201cdeveloped world\u201d including, quite recently, the United States?\u00a0 The standard answer includes a heavy dose of \u201cchildren used to contribute to the family\u2019s financial well-being, as farmworkers and future caretakers in old age, now they are just a costly burden.\u201d\u00a0 Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, herself the mother of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,445],"class_list":["post-18937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-families","tag-fertility-rate"],"yoast_head":"\nCuring the Birth Dearth: Reading Hannah's Children<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Why has the birth rate cratered in the "developed world" including, quite recently, the United States?\u00a0 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