Economics professor Catherine Pakaluk wrote a book about modern people choosing to have large families in the book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, published by Regnery. I only just learned of it by way of a Slate review article. Of course, one reason is that I’ve found it interesting how the average family size all around the world has been in steep decline in just about every society and culture, under governments that range from free to authoritarian. Theories about those things related to family size seem not to make much difference. Other popular explanations have to do with birth control technologies (so-called family planning, one supposes), changing human geography from farming to city life, and the ever improving rates of surviving birth and childhood’s gamut of diseases.
Another reason, also of course, is our own friend in the comments who chose to have a large family.
Pakaluk explained to City Journal why she wrote the book:
Families don’t demand children in the way that consumers demand goods and services; they are both demanders and suppliers of the same good. What is wanted, if it is wanted, is a child of one’s own. The upshot of this is that it’s hard to know whether falling birth rates are more of a demand shift, with fewer children wanted, or more of a supply shift, with fewer children produced.
My findings pointed to falling birth rates being more of a demand problem than a supply problem. The women I interviewed, at every level of engagement with paid work and every income, had additional children because they valued children more than other things they could do with their time, talents, and money. The relevant obstacle to choosing a child, they said, was the cost of missing out. They talked about sleepless nights and giving up comforts, plans, hobbies, status, income, a clean house. Giving up alone time. Giving up freedom. These costs were big and consequential, they conceded. But they had a reason to pay the price.
The Slate reviewer, Rebecca Onion, said:
This is a book about the romance of having a big family, and its interviewees speak in almost mystical ways about the experience. The difference between having four and five and six and seven kids is marginal, once you get up there, or so Pakaluk and her interviewees argue. They say that even logistical problems obvious to me, like “How could a family with 12 kids ever have a family car?,” are solvable. “A lot of things that people think are going to be big expenses also don’t turn out to be. All my kids are wearing hand-me-down clothing,” one mother says.
It does sound like an appealing book, and not solely for a conservative Regnery audience.
Pakaluk’s interviewees—unlike the trad wife influencers who have been the object of so much fascination in liberal media since around 2016—are not packaging up their lives for curious onlookers. The women interviewed in this book are not, as far as I can tell, angling for spon-con deals, political clout, or hits of dopamine. Pakaluk’s interviewees are speaking, instead, to someone they trust. And as I made it through the book, I was surprised to finally feel as if I understood where these women are coming from.
I can’t say that I’ve decided whether the birth dearth is a big problem or not. I come from a small family with parents who were each only children: no aunts, uncles, or cousins. I grew up around my grandparents’ generation, though, and they came from the big families we know from our long-ago traditions.
But it isn’t necessarily useful to treat everything as a crisis. And certainly not as a passive consumer of news, politics, and current affairs infotainment. Panic won’t fix anything.
Good morning. It’s good to be back in familiar surroundings after three weeks abroad. I should have tried harder to disconnect from events around the world but couldn’t do it. I had hoped some of the problems would solve themselves in my absence.
In academia, I am considered to have a large family with three children. I would have wanted more (Pam and I thought 4-6 sounded fine), but the timing of her death precluded that (there's 8+ years between my son with her and the younger two).
In listening to academic women talk, I realize they live in a different world than I do. That's pretty much the easiest way to describe it. They seem overwhelmed at the idea of having children. I was a single parent for three years, if I can survive it, I am sure they and their husband can as well.
The danger is, consistently, they think everyone should be like they are....