Why Some Educated Women Are Choosing Big Families (and What It Says About Motherhood Today) with Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah's Children | Ep. 129

0:01Hey, MomFriend. It's Layla welcoming you back to the best podcast of motherhood because you get to be encouraged and supported on hard topics without being overwhelmed. I'm so glad that you found us, Mom Friend. Now, this podcast does tend to lean a little on the crunchy and holistic side. We love screen-free play, barefoot outside adventures, intentional family time, and always questioning the status quo, asking ourselves if something is truly the best choice for our families or just today's cultural norm. So if that sounds like your vibe, you're going to love it here. Each expert guest comes with their own perspective and background.

0:38so please note that the content presented in this podcast is designed for general educational purposes only and is not a substitute for personalized professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Hi, Katherine. Welcome to the Learning to Mom podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. It is such an honor for you to be here. Your book has meant so much to me. There's probably like four books that have made a lifelong impact on me. And Hannah's Children is one of them. Oh, that's so great to hear. And I recommend it to everyone. So I had to have you on. So thank you so much for coming on. You're so welcome.

1:19It's a pleasure. Well, for those who haven't quite heard of your book or know you yet, do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your background prior to writing Hannah's Children? children? Sure. So I grew up in a big family and loved studying and loved ideas. I thought a lot about pro-life work and I thought a lot about the things people worried about at the time, which going back to the 1990s was like, maybe there's too many people in the world, this whole thing. Then in the middle of college, I discerned this idea that would be really good to help figure out if there were too many people in the world because people used to say this all the time.

1:59So anyway, I went to college, finished college in economics, and then went to graduate school to kind of help myself answer questions about population growth and where people are going wrong when they were talking about how there are just too many people in the world. And of course, this should strike you as funny because we all know that right now we're really looking at like not enough people in the world and a kind of a different crisis. Anyway, met my husband in graduate school. The quick version is we had six children when I was still finishing my doctoral work in economics. And then we moved to Washington, D.C., where we've been living for about 10 years.

2:33Together, we've had eight children. And we also raised six children from his first marriage. He was a widower when we got married. So children have been a huge part of our life. Learning to be a mom has been a big part of my life. I sometimes say that it's kind of funny because as soon as you sort of feel like you're like really getting good at it You're done having kids and you're like, oh no, it's I'm really good at this now Now I have to learn to unmom and that's a weird expression But like my kids are moving away from home and that's like a whole other phase of motherhood Which you might not want to know about now, but um, it does feel like a new learning process anyway So I just love being a mom.

3:10Um, loved having kids and raising them And that's kind of where I was when I really discerned a call to write this book Can you give a brief synopsis of what the book entails? Yeah. Yeah. It's really sort of a simple idea. But basically, everybody's studying the decline in birth rates. So I don't know if everybody listening to this podcast knows that there are fewer and fewer people being born every year and so many fewer being born that a lot of governments are kind of experimenting with crazy new policies to get people to have babies. So I just thought, well, in a sea of people not having babies, one thing that would be really interesting to do is go in and talk to people who are having children and kind of figure out like what motivates them, what gets people started on that path, what gets them to keep going.

3:58Like suppose we had a country where people were really plagued by a lot of bad health. Well, one thing you could do is study the sick populations. And another thing you could do is study people who had gotten healthy. And you could kind of ask them like, what are your tricks? What are the things you're doing? like study what works because you can't learn how to do something well by studying only what people do badly yeah right and so again going back to this book project the idea was like well people are having a really hard time transitioning to marriage uh starting their families there's a lot of fears there's a lot of concerns and questions and so go around and talk to a whole bunch of people uh in different backgrounds different circumstances and just trying to figure out like what what happened in your life like what was your experience what what made it work and so somehow all those amazing stories because of course you know I go talk to all these people and I'm like wow every every woman's living room that I walked into was just a a universe of wisdom and treasure yeah it was such a privilege to hear all those stories and so then I just packaged them up into a into a book and tried to explain uh to the public what I learned And that fruit of that book is Hannah's children.

5:14Well, I mean, what you learned, but then you graced all of us with all of this. I learned so much. When I convince someone, and let me tell you, I convince people to read this book. I'm out there. You would think that I'm like being paid by you. You're like getting paid. I really am obsessed. And I say that the first 25%, and I could be off, maybe it's first 50, 25, is you debunking all the myths of who has babies and who doesn't. And the rest of the book are these beautiful interviews with women who are college educated and have five or more children. And I mean, I laughed, I cried, I was so inspired.

5:56And yet there's all these like tangible tips for how they're actually doing it woven throughout. It is phenomenal. So hopefully you all are feeling inspired to pick this up. The first thing that I do want to talk about, we talked a little bit about it at the beginning is for those who may not know what exactly is the birth dearth and why is it such a pressing issue in America right now? Yeah. Yeah. So I borrowed that term from an author from the 1980s, but the birth dearth is kind of a cutesy phrase to indicate that whole countries and actually increasingly the world are not having enough births for us to stay the same, the same as we are now.

6:37And I say that like really broadly, like politically, economically, ethnically. Then of course we could talk about like the human issues. So when I say, what does that mean concretely? The main way people describe like dearth of births is we look at what number of babies it would take to replace ourselves. So if a husband and wife get together and they have exactly two children, right? There's two children for that couple. So So if they have exactly two children, they have replaced themselves. So when they pass away, their footprint in humanity will be replaced by their two children. And so if you have, on average, a few more than two children per couple, the population will grow a little bit.

7:23When that couple passes away, they will have left behind, say, three children. And if they just have one child, then when that couple passes away, the population will have been cut in half. So that's a good way to think about it. So what we are seeing today and going back many decades now is we're quite below that two number, quite below. So what that means is that we're getting very close to population not just shrinking, but actually beginning to get close to cutting in half in every generation. This is why it's important to raise the question, well, like, are there too many people? And there's a lot of ways to go about that question.

8:00I won't go into all of them now. But what's happened today is that enough governments and policymakers and pundits have sort of realized, wow, like if in every generation you have a shrinking of the number of people, we won't be able to have economic growth. When we think about what a Rust Belt city is like, where their businesses are shuttered, you go and the Waffle House isn't open anymore, and there's closed-down gas stations, that's kind of what you're going to have to see at a large level. And nobody really knows what that will look like because we've never sustained shrinking populations before.

8:36But you have whole countries now that have been shrinking for quite a long time. Japan, China. Oh, China. People think China's exploding. China's birth rate is very low, close to one, and they are already shrinking. If you've ever finished an episode and thought, I could have listened to that interview for another hour, I get it. Sometimes I have to cut out the best parts just to fit the time limits of podcast platforms to be able to rank in their algorithms. Because let's be real, it's not like I'm Alex Cooper over here. But inside the mom club, those limits don't exist because we're not bound by podcast player algorithms I have to pay attention to.

9:13You get the entire conversation, every story, every question, every answer the guest shares. That's 15 to 30 more minutes of every episode that's only saved for the mom club members. And that's important because it allows you to hear the whole truth and feel confident in what you take away from it. Gosh, it's an incredible space. I love it so much. And I can't wait to meet you inside. So come join us at learningtomompodcast.com slash join. Yes, that's in the show notes for you. I'll meet you inside, my mom friend. I would say that was so fascinating to me, and it really made me think about it in a whole new light.

9:51Because I really have only ever thought about having a large family from a religious point of view. But you broke it down from just statistics, number, basically anything but. Yeah. And it was just fascinating for my brain to really understand it. So I am curious if you could share what your research suggests about how ideas of like purpose, religion, or identity factors into women's fertility choices. Yeah. Because I think a lot of people think like Catholics are having so many kids, so we're fine. Yeah, yeah. Well, in some sense it is fine, and I'll say it this way. Let's see. We are not likely to go back to a world where kind of like everybody has three or four kids.

10:39Like, it's not likely. And so what's keeping us together, we'll say that, is sort of like what we see in Israel. So Israel is the only country in the modern world that has a sustainable birth rate. And their birth rate isn't like 10. The birth rate in Israel is just about three, a little bit below three. And that's because a lot of religious Jews in Israel choose to have larger families. And that balances out the more secular Israelis that have smaller families. And so that's what I mean by saying, yes, there's a bunch of Catholics, a minority of Catholics who have a lot of kids, a minority of Mormons, a minority of evangelicals.

11:24Like, actually, you find this across the board. That was actually exactly what I was trying to describe. Like, who are these people? Who are these people that have kids anyway? And yeah, so like in one sense, it's okay that some people have a lot of kids because it balances out that some people don't have kids at all. And the whole question for countries going forward is going to be, do you have enough people still having kids to kind of balance out? And the reason I'm putting it that way and kind of highlighting this like dichotomy between the religious and the secular is because the alternative, and this is like a dark future, the alternative is countries either trying to coerce women to have children, trying to get everybody to have their fair share, so to speak.

12:10Like, you know, I mean, and listen, as soon as you get it out of your mouth, you're like, hmm, that's kind of yucky. What would that look like? And you can imagine like higher tax rates for people who haven't hit their minimum quota of kids. People have talked about that. And as soon as you're like, wait, what? Oh, gross. Like certainly places like China where they have really tyrannical measures of social control. It could turn off your money. They can turn off your passport, things like that. So we will see that. We will see that in places that don't respect human dignity and freedom. I would, you know, it would be pretty sad future if, you know, people started to think, well, let's just, you know, let's just turn back the clock of women going to college.

12:50Let's just turn back the clock on all of this because it's, you know, because the conclusion a lot of people have is this modernity that has led women to have fewer children. It's being educated. It's the fact that they can go to work. Now, I don't think any of that is causal in like a tight way, but we have to be really Be careful about it because we are hearing from a lot of places these days like that would be the solution. And so this is why I think it's important to write about people who, of their own free will, feel pretty called to welcome extra children. 100%. Yeah. Quick question for you.

13:23Yeah. What is the birth rate in America right now? Ah, well, 2024, which is the last year we have complete data for, it's just under 1.6. So we are 1.59 is the official number for 2024, which is the lowest we've ever recorded. Wow. Yeah. So just coming in on 1.5. What was it 50 years ago or 100 years ago to give us some perspective? Yeah. So a great way to think about it is if you go back to 1800, which is kind of about as far back as we've got good records, it was about eight births per woman. Now, remember, a lot of those babies didn't make it, didn't survive. However, the United States has always distinguished itself from Europe by having actually higher birth rates.

14:10So when people like Alexis de Tocqueville or even like Adam Smith, an early economist, was like looking at the United States, it was like, wow, like how do they have such a great like high birth rate? Which is funny because in those days it was considered really like a part of your wealth if you could have a lot of kids, right? So, of course, today that's been turned around. So, yeah, a good way to think about it is like 1800 is about eight. You go 100 years later to 1900, and it's a cut in half. So it's about four, a little under four. You go one more 100 years later to 2000, and it's about two.

14:43We're just trending below two. Now, it might look like, well, gosh, how did we go from two to 1.5 in 25 years? But actually, that's because that two is a little bit inflated. What happened is really the big shift was from 1900 was like maybe 3.7. And then that kind of it dips down in the Second World War and then it pops back up after the war. That's like that baby boom era. So it's kind of hard. Like people have different theories about what was going on with the war and the baby boom. But then the next big shift isn't really 2000. The next big shift is like 1960. And after 1960, you see a really big decrease down to about 1.7, 1.6.

15:27And that is you're shaking your head. That is like that whole package of things we would affiliate with the advent of the birth control pill. So what happens then, it's not that the pill makes people less fertile or less interested in having children, but it puts a new option on the table. I think that's the way to think about it. So now people are thinking, okay, I could finish college and not give up being married or coupling up. I could finish law school and I could postpone my first kid. So they're seeing their educational opportunities in like longer chunks now because the pill is really effective.

16:04And so that was a huge change. And I think mostly it's not that people thought kids weren't so valuable anymore, but that was another option on the table. Like I could have kids and be a lawyer. I could have kids and be a doctor. And what that does is like, you know, like with anything else, your tummy has only got so much room in it. So if you want chocolate and vanilla, you're going to have less of each kind. So I think pretty naturally people want a little bit of both. And then, you know, there's a limit. Like time gives you a tradeoff. It's like if you head into your 20s with that very clear sense of purpose, like my children, the family I'm building is more important to me than my career.

16:46What we're sort of seeing is like those folks, they do a thing which is a little different. They just sort of go after that family goal that they have, and they fit their education plans and their careers around that family goal. Whereas most young women growing up in America today are coached to fit their children around their career goals. And that second approach tends to just lead to fewer children. Right. Because of time. Because of time. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And so then they're like, you know, 35 and wondering, like, when did I make a choice to be on this path where, you know, I was sort of fitting my kids around my career markers?

17:30And they realize they kind of regret not being able to have one more. And we're seeing that regret or that sort of sense of like, loss, like, I really would I would have liked to have fit in one more. and they just didn't know they weren't helped to see early enough like maybe start it earlier you know transition to being a mom a little earlier I am kind of optimistic that this moment might lead to a lot of conversations like this one and a lot of women sort of like yeah grabbing at it like just you know go go have your first like a little sooner than you thought because you know what if you end up just falling in love with your baby which you probably will you'll have a little extra your time to have one more before you're done.

18:10And we hear that all the time. It's like, I didn't know how much I was going to love this. No, I can relate to that so much. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But I do kind of want to stop here. Sure. And I think because to a listener who has never encountered you before or your work, I will say that I think things that you just said might make them misconstrue your intentions. And they may be thinking right now, I have to give up my whole career to have all these kids, or she's saying that women don't belong in the workforce. So I just kind of want to talk about that of what you really mean. If you've been thinking about switching to non-toxic cleaning supplies, especially your laundry detergent or your dishwasher soap, so you can stop feeling guilty whenever you use harmful ingredients in your home, let me introduce you to Truly Free Home, my ride or die cleaning product company.

19:05I only buy from them because they are actually clean, non-toxic, and don't put my family at risk for anything. And their stuff works just as well as what you're used to using. Head to the link in the show notes, use that link and my code learning to mom, all caps, all one word to receive 30 % off on the best husband approved cleaning products ever. Okay. Go check that out right now before you forget. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, we are seeing a cross support is that women really want to be, they want to be able to fulfill and make use of all their gifts. And that's a really good thing. I mean, here I am standing in front of you with a PhD and I teach full time.

19:45And so I'm not the person who's sort of like, no, it's just like what I'm sort of here to report is that the women who are least likely to regret not being able to fit in all the kids that they wanted started from an earlier age planning for the families that they wanted. Because the world and sort of like our normal path through education, this was mine. I mean, this was my path. Like it's everything I always heard was you want to get all of this stuff in. You need to get the degree, like the graduate degree, like start the job, hit a certain place in your job. Like you do all of those things and then you start to have your family.

20:25But what I've found is that lots of sources tell us this, that this regret about like, like that one kid you didn't fit in, it's pretty universal. We see it in lots of countries, all over at different. And so if you sort of see like, okay, look, there's a lot of women who feel like they didn't quite build the family that they were hoping for. We call this the fertility gap, by the way, it's like it's got, it's a technical term, it's out there. It's the gap between how many women, how many children young women expect to have or sort of say that they hope to have when they're young, like 20, and how many children they end up having.

21:04And we are seeing across countries and all kinds of data that there's about a one child gap, like that's the missing child. And policymakers want to know, like, how can you help women overcome that gap? And this is where what's happened is like a lot of countries are like, well, let's just let's send people like subsidy checks because that'll, but it's, this is, first of all, the subsidy checks haven't really worked. What seems to be much more important is that at a younger age, women are coached to see, like, you've got a plan for this. And, you know, you don't know whether you're going to want that second one or that third one.

21:40So, you know, try it out sooner. Because if you end up being the one who's like, oh, like, I'd really love another one. You know, if you start when you're 38, eight, it might be tough. So no, what I'm ultimately saying is that there has definitely been in the 20th century, a squeeze between these two good things. That's why I kind of, it sounds maybe like flippant to call them chocolate and vanilla, but that that squeeze between career and family that women would like both. we just um we kind of let we let the um the existing timeline kind of drive the train for a while and i think what is definitely happening right now is a lot of people are waking up and saying we didn't have to let that drive the train like if you know from a young age you want to um have both you can think when you're in college you can think about choosing a career where there's more flexibility where there's more part-time options you know things like that so you don't wake up at 29 and say, oh gosh, like to have a child now, I'd have to completely change my life.

22:46That becomes so hard and heartbreaking. Yeah. Yeah. So no, I'm, I'm completely in favor of women like crafting a purposeful life. And, uh, what we know from the data is the thing that's not the, the place where people are missing is like, they're, they're feeling like it's difficult to transition to the number of children that they kind of wanted. And so that's the, so that's where the emphasis is, mainly because it's the piece of the puzzle that I think we haven't kind of solved. In other words, we've solved the, you know, women shouldn't go to college puzzle, or we've solved the like, you can't do that because you're a woman or, you know, girls don't do X, that problem.

23:24I mean, I don't want to be flippant. There's still, there's still kinds of issues. But, but yeah, I'm not, I'm not the apostle of like, don't work or anything to that effect. So the reason to do that is because if people are consistently kind of missing out on what they thought they would like from their marriages or their family, you got to give them more options, like more seeds for the imagination, I guess I'd put it that way. So when you talk about these women that you spoke to, as we've alluded to it, or as we've mentioned, you specifically focused on women who were college educated and had five or more children.

24:03But I guess, why was it five kids? Why was it college educated? Oh, sure. There was a specific research purpose to focus on that in my book. Now, OK, let me tell you, the five is totally arbitrary. Five could have been four. It could have been three. With the five kids, you had to pick a line. You had to have a line someplace. I knew I wanted to interview people who really wanted kids. Because I wanted to find out, why did you want kids? Because this is the big thing we're dealing with, is that a lot of people don't see a reason to have kids. So that's the five. The five is not meant to be normative.

24:39The college education, the reason to do that, again, you can't interview everybody, but basically across countries, we see that the more education people have, the fewer children they have. So that's really where that squeeze comes in. Like the squeeze that I mentioned, it does seem to be really correlated with having a lot of education. So what you're trying to find out, And to that point I made earlier, is it necessary for women to not go to college to want to have children? I don't suspect that that's true at all. So I figured, well, if you're going to go out and hunt down some interesting interviews to bring to the public, go after those people who could have done anything with their lives.

25:22They had all the doors were open to them. And they have a college degree and they still wanted kids. If you have a college degree and you still want two or three kids, you are saying with your life that going to college doesn't make you not want to have kids. So in other words, you're saying it's something else that we're after. It's not education that's ruining people's interests and children. This is something else. So in a sense, the job there was on the one hand to illustrate it's not college is not the problem. Yeah. College is not the problem. Becoming well-educated is a really great good.

26:02And I think if people are able and want to, they should. Yeah. When you met with these women. Yeah. What were some of the biggest misconceptions that I guess that either you had or just do you think people have about families who have? I think honestly the biggest misconception is that it's somehow like rabbit like behavior and people say like breeding like rabbits or it's like that it didn't happen on purpose or didn't happen for good reasons. You know, like you just can't control yourself and you didn't plan this right like nobody would plan this. I think that is the biggest misconception. It's not the only one.

26:39I mean the point of writing the book was like there are reasons. There are really interesting reasons. And so for me, what I learned was like, wow, these reasons are really interesting and they have words and people have words for them. And a lot of their words are not the same as my words. So I really was fascinated. Interrupting this week's episode real quick for this week's segment of MomMail. If you're new here, this is the part of the show where I answer a listener submitted situation or scenario. Basically, you write in your tricky situation and I give you advice only a real mom friend would give.

27:13Here's the email we're answering today. Hi, Layla. First, thanks so much for everything you do for the podcast. I found this podcast several months ago, but only wish that I found it earlier, especially in my first pregnancy, to go through all of season one episodes about pregnancy and birth. I also just joined the mom club and I'm loving it. Thank you for making such a cool place for us moms. Okay, this might be dumb, but it's been bothering me and I need an outside opinion. There was a baby name I was thinking about using and I loved it like it was our top name. It's a little more unique. So at one point I asked a friend what she thought of it just to get another opinion and make sure I wasn't being weird.