Brave is the economist who looks at a societal problem and tells the world that, actually, it will take much more than an economic solution to fix it. That economist is Catherine Ruth Pakaluk in her new book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.
In Hannah’s Children, Pakaluk interviews 55 college-educated mothers who had five or more children with their current spouse. She narrowed her interview subjects to women born in the United States, but the information she gleans is useful for every Western nation. After all, Italy, Germany, and many more countries are experiencing declining birth rates and their attendant issues: “an aging population, economic recession, depression, and ultimately … depopulation.” In every chapter, the reader is introduced to women who say their faith—be it Judaism, Roman Catholicism, or Mormonism—played a significant part in their desire and ability to raise a large family. She didn’t set out only to interview religious women, writes Pakaluk, who teaches at the Catholic University of America and is herself a mother of more than five children. Rather, she realized that faith in a higher power was the thread tying together all of these women, who were otherwise separated by geography, socioeconomic status, career choice, and upbringing.
Throughout the book, the stories of the mothers shine through. There’s Kim, a pastor’s wife with 12 children who originally thought she did not want to be a mom. There’s Jenn, who pressed on after many miscarriages—and even had a heart attack while pregnant—to deliver six children. There’s Terry, the mother of ten who got married and played college volleyball through her first pregnancy. And there’s Hannah, who, along with the biblical Hannah, seems to inspire the book’s title. A Jewish mother of seven, Hannah likens having children to joining a “chain of infinity” and says that this realization helped her find her purpose after years of searching.
The mothers interviewed in this book are among the 5% of U.S. women who have five or more children. This percentage has remained constant since 1990, even as the country’s total fertility rate has fallen to under 1.7 births per woman. (Meanwhile, the total fertility rate in the European Union has fallen to 1.53 births per woman.) The key to reversing the birth dearth lies in the stories of these women, Pakaluk writes. Their desires to create big families didn’t come from baby bonuses, opposition to family planning, or overbearing patriarchs. Rather, they saw the rewards of having a big family as more valuable than career, travel, sleep, and many other goods. In interview after interview, the mothers say that every hardship was worth it and only strengthened their resolve to be open to new life.
So how can we grow the 5%—or at least ensure this percentage doesn’t shrink? Some of Pakaluk’s conclusions may affront family policy advocates on both the Left and the Right. The women she interviewed weren’t responding to external carrots and sticks. They felt internally called to have big families. Expanded parental leave, child tax credits, and even cash incentives won’t change hearts and minds or the ultimate posture of a society towards children, Pakaluk concludes, going so far as to call the idea “fantastical.” She would rather the government get out of the way than try to directly incentivize a baby boom, even if such incentives are a form of signaling what’s good for society.
“It may be possible, however, to foster childbearing indirectly by cultivating the conditions in which incentives that are weighty enough to inspire women to have more children arise,” she writes. “The policy lesson is simple: the flourishing of traditional religious institutions breaks the low-marriage-low-fertility cycle. People will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies … Religion is the cardinal family policy.”
Pakaluk’s prescription for the birth dearth: more religious freedom, more religious education, and just more religion in general. She might be onto something. For example, the nation of Georgia managed to spike fertility rates in 2008 after Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church personally started baptizing all third-or-higher children born to married Orthodox couples.
Not just economic problems but social problems can be solved by addressing the birth dearth, Pakaluk claims. Writers like Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have spilled gallons of ink examining why today’s children, although they enjoy more material benefits than any prior generations, are struggling emotionally at unprecedented rates. Pakaluk’s solution is simple: more babies. Her solution is not just more babies but raising more children in big family environments where they can learn from, encourage, and even sacrifice for their siblings. She includes an anecdote from Jackie, a mother of 12, who says her son would have “probably been categorized with depression or anxiety problems” if it weren’t for his baby sister.
“He would just hold her and his whole mannerism would change,” Jackie says. “It was almost like the people who have the need to be in sunlight … It was almost like a sunlamp. I could just watch his body language, his facial expressions, and he would be better.”
How is society different when having children, and lots of them, is prioritized? That’s a question that Pakaluk raises throughout the book. Time and time again, her interviewees credit the experience of growing up in a big family with “fostering pro-social virtues” in their children. (A society chiefly made up of firstborns sounds like a Huxleyan nightmare, does it not?) But it’s not just children who are impacted—their parents are, too. “How does being a mom or dad affect our outward-facing work? Is a nation having children later and later different from one in which childbearing happens earlier?” she asks. It seems the answer is yes. Sociologist Brad Wilcox, whom Pakaluk cites in Hannah’s Children, recently pointed out that the U.S. has crossed a “historic threshold” as there are now more single adults ages 18 to 55 with no children than there are married adults with children in the same age bracket. Other Western nations are likely not far behind. It’s the issue that Republican U.S. Senator J.D. Vance raised when, as a candidate, he blasted the “childless Left” in a 2021 speech that caused mass media hysteria.
The mothers Pakaluk interviews know that they are swimming against the cultural tide, and they are at peace with that. They recount rude questions from strangers during vacations, awkward jokes by acquaintances about how babies are made, and reliance on secondhand clothes and bargain shopping to balance budgets. These women are aspirational in many ways: in their marriages, their stamina, and their big-picture thinking. Some of them have given birth more than ten times—an Olympic-athlete-level feat, if you ask me. They are living what many people would consider extreme lives, but that doesn’t mean their wisdom is only for a select few. The interviewees talk about enjoying instead of dreading their children’s teen years, trusting God to provide for their family financially, and making tough decisions to step back from professional and academic pursuits (only one of the women profiled in the book is the primary breadwinner for her family).
Gen Z women, the oldest of whom are 27, are already having children. Who’s influencing their ideas about motherhood? How many of them are future Hannahs? There has always been something life-giving about stepping into the home of a big, joyful family, but unlike the Gen X mothers profiled in Hannah’s Children, future Hannahs can enter these homes without actually stepping inside. Social media has shown that people are curious—even hungry—to see content about big families, and some of the most popular creators are moms who could easily slot into Pakaluk’s rubric. Hannah Neeleman, known on Instagram as @ballerinafarm, has nearly nine million followers who watch her and her husband care for their eight children on a working ranch in the American West. (She is yet another Hannah whom Pakaluk has written about.) Neeleman is also a Juilliard-trained ballerina, winner of the 2023 Mrs. American pageant, and drop-dead gorgeous.
But in today’s world of keyboard warriors who want equity for everyone and exceptionalism for no one, aspirational figures are rarely given a warm welcome. Neeleman is no exception. Commenters take aim at her for competing in the Mrs. World pageant with a newborn in tow, for marrying rich but eschewing many modern luxuries, and for simply enjoying her life. Still, her fans outnumber her detractors. Young women are attracted to her enjoyment of her young children, her ability to dress up in a tiara or dress down in a flour-covered apron, and her love of finding beauty in the everyday. Such content likely does more to spread a pro-family message than graphs about the fertility crisis ever could. In the same way, the mothers in Hannah’s Children inspire those who enter their homes to consider openness to new life.
“I think a good place to start if you want to stretch yourself is just to say, ‘Maybe I’ll have one more kid.’ Just be open to having one more kid,” a Jewish mother named Esther says in Hannah’s Children.
In Hannah’s Children, Pakaluk does not feel a need to start at ground zero, addressing what ‘goodness’ means, why selflessness is a virtue, or why marriage should be encouraged. One worries that her message might be preaching to the pro-natalist choir. Pakaluk starts with the assumption that modern women are encouraged to prioritize career over family, but many fourth-wave feminists would vehemently disagree. Novelist R.O. Kwon, who has chosen not to have children, takes the opposite position in a TIME essay titled “The Parents Who Regret Having Children,” published in April 2024. “I don’t think I ever decided to have kids. I was pretty much just told that that’s what you do. That’s what girls are for,” a mom in her 40s tells Kwon. The mom wishes she never got pregnant with her first child and says she would write, take walks, and ponder in solitude if given a do-over.
Although their interviews took place long before Kwon’s piece was published, some of the mothers in Hannah’s Children offer a direct rebuttal to this sentiment. The aforementioned Hannah says it’s easy to blame “children, or the idea of having children” when things are hard: “But if people understood that this is your allotted degree of stress by who you are and your nature … why not have the best things anyway? Have the children anyway!”
“One problem is that our culture wants just one kind of story about parenting, and it’s a story of ‘pure joy,’” Kwon writes, attributing the phrase “pure joy” to psychotherapist Yael Goldstein-Love. The mothers in Hannah’s Children talk a lot about joy, but they also talk about the heartbreak of losing a loved one, the hardships of adjusting to life as a new mom, and the sadness they feel realizing their childbearing years have ended. Pakaluk writes that several interviewees continued having children “in the face of severe emotional and physical hardships too personal to mention.” Since the interviews are anonymous, it is hard not to wish that those women would have been willing to share more. Rarely does the book get raw, but maybe that’s the point. Family life isn’t pure joy, but it is joy triumphant. These mothers, many of whom have adult children now, can look back on their early years of parenting and filter it through the lessons they learned and the unknown blessings they received. From the vantage point they enjoy, even their most painful moments no longer have ragged edges, just like the pain of childbirth fades from a woman’s memory.
The mothers say they wouldn’t be themselves without the challenges. The interviewees push back on the notion that motherhood separates women from their true selves. As one mother puts it, “I don’t feel like [my children have] made me lose who I am. I feel like they’re helping me become who I need to be.”
Pakaluk seems to be saying that society needs more people who put others first. By reducing religious institutions to weekend-only, check-the-box affairs, Western society has started an individual-focused death spiral. Tinkering and technocracy won’t get us out of it, she argues. Only transcendental truth can. Hannah’s Children is a manifesto, not a manual; Pakaluk doesn’t offer specific solutions in this area, possibly because she doesn’t believe such solutions should be top-down. Perhaps the main takeaway from Hannah’s Children lies in a single word in the subtitle: the women quietly defying the birth dearth. These women didn’t ask to tell their stories. They were leading quiet lives before Pakaluk interviewed them, and they continued to lead quiet lives after. But someone finally listened, and their message can be summed up in a single quote from one of the mothers: “In general, I think people are good for the world.”
