In Hannah’s Children, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk has written a ground-breaking book that provides novel, timely, and critical insight into the dramatic fertility decline that is taking place in developed nations. Pakaluk, a Harvard-trained economist who has eight children herself, conducted interviews with fifty-five college educated women living in the United States who had five or more children, seeking to understand why they had chosen to have such large families. Though we hear from the women about their children’s fathers, the story is told through the lens of the mothers.
Most research on questions about fertility—indeed, about household economics generally—is based on quantitative research, which looks primarily at economic models and statistical studies. Pakaluk was rightly dissatisfied with this approach. As she points out, existing economic models do not explain why fertility rates move so little in response to public policy interventions like “baby bonuses,” nor do they explain the reasons behind falling fertility. In the face of this gap in our understanding of fertility, Pakaluk offers us a brilliant book based on her qualitative work. Taking the role of ethnographer, she investigates “the meanings that women attach to the choices they have made—the reasons they wanted kids and the reasons they kept wanting them.” Hearing directly from “Hannah” and the other interviewed mothers of many articulate their own “reasons of the heart” is the strongest element of Pakaluk’s book.
What Pakaluk’s book uncovers about the motivations of these mothers should radically shift our national conversation about fertility decline. As Christine Emba observed in her own review, the standard understanding of fertility rates goes something like this: “People are deciding not to have kids because of the high cost of childcare, a lack of parental leave, and the wage penalty mothers face.” The standard solution? A raft of tremendously expensive government programming to help address these costs. The problem with this theory is that it has been a spectacular failure when applied to real life. As Emba points out, South Korea “spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years on policies meant to boost fertility … yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 percent.”
Hannah’s Children offers a beautiful accounting of this mystery. The women featured in the book decided to have their children not because they felt in advance that they could afford them, but because they understood themselves and their choices within a comprehensive moral framework in which every child is valued as a gift, and child bearing and rearing is a deep source of personal meaning. Pakaluk writes, “For a woman in this rare demographic, her children are a blessing upon her marriage, a gift to her other children, and a fulfillment of her desire for the infinite good who is God.”
Granted, the women selected for the study were all college-educated, a group that represents less than half of American women and is less likely to experience poverty. Nonetheless, the book still offers invaluable insight. It helps us to see what could motivate an educated woman to make the sacrifices required to bring a life into the world, risking her health and career advancement to do so. It is such a valuable insight that the purpose of this essay is to implore Pakaluk to write another book.
Next time, please interview the fathers.
Deciding Together
Most research into fertility decline does not consider the motivations, values, or much of anything at all about fathers. The US Census Bureau did not even release a report on men’s fertility until 2019. At the time, a demographer noted the novel nature of the study, stating that for the first time they were able to “look at the fertility of men as well as women.” Too often, the desires and motivations of potential and actual fathers are treated as irrelevant to questions about the overall fertility rate. Instead, explanations for fertility decline focus on women, usually along the following lines: as “women have more options for their lives than ever and more control over their reproduction … fertility rates decline.” Thus, many popular measures to boost fertility rates are directed exclusively or primarily towards women. Many countries with left-leaning governments heavily subsidize childcare in order to make it easier for women to work. On the other side of the political spectrum, the populist government in Hungary gave women with four or more children a “lifelong exemption from personal income tax.”
To be sure, Pakaluk’s book likewise focuses on mothers. But this economist expands the economic concept of “opportunity cost” well beyond dollars and cents. Pakaluk repeats throughout the book that these women are not acting irrationally: it’s just that, for them, the “costs” of foregoing children are outweighed by “benefits” of having them, when interpersonal and transcendent meanings are added in. Included in these meanings are the relationships they and their children have with their men.
Too often in mainstream discourse today, to the extent a potential father’s influence on fertility decisions is discussed at all, it is largely in terms of an oppressive husband forcing his wife to have children she doesn’t want. Social commentator Jill Filipovic, for example, has written that conservatives interested in fertility “emphasize the necessity of male dominance and female submission, including women who will submit to having as many babies as a man desires.” The interviews in Hannah’s Children, however, make clear that both the (1) “man as irrelevant to a woman’s decision to have children” theory and (2) the “wife as doormat to an overbearing husband” theory are profoundly incorrect. Instead, the women interviewed for Dr. Pakaluk’s book speak over and over again about the decision to have children at all, as well as the decision to be open to each successive child, as a mutual one between husband and wife. This is even true of “Lauren,” the only non-religious woman featured in the book, who bore many children as a kind of gift to her husband, who had always wanted a large family.
But for most of the women Pakaluk interviewed, the joint decision-making process unfolds based on extensive conversation, prayer, and active discernment with their husbands. For example, “Shaylee,” a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, came from a big family—as did her husband. Even so, they considered deeply the question of how many children to have. Shaylee explained, “we’ve both experienced life in a big family, but we’ve never had an aspiration to a certain number or we’ve just kind of taken it one at a time.” For this couple (who had seven children together in fourteen years) their process of discerning another child goes like this:
we … make it a matter of prayer together and independently … and just keep thinking about it and talking about it and … eventually peace comes and we just feel good about it. Or we each have our “Aha!” moment, which sometimes comes separately, but we ended up in the same place where we’re just like, “Yeah, we’re doing it again.”
Thus, Hannah’s Children provides significant insight into this mutual decision-making process from the mother’s point of view, which also reveals a great deal about their husbands. Some questions are left unanswered, however. Do these husbands have different worries about expanding their families than their wives? What social pressures are they under with regard to their families? What meaning do these men derive from fathering children? Do the fathers regard themselves as primarily “supporting” their wives, or would the men articulate a similar kind of joy in the relations they have with each of their children? Do different men experience fatherhood differently? Can we say anything about how fatherhood differs from the experience of motherhood? Did certain aspects of their relationships with their children surprise them? One highly educated mother, “Angela,” repeated that “children need their mothers.” Would the fathers say that “children need their fathers”?
Involved Dads
Hannah’s Children does offer significant insight into the involvement of these fathers in family life. One criticism lodged against large families like these is that they are “neo-patriarchal,” or that they leave the wife with the sole burden of running the household and caring for the children.
Zack Beauchamp, the author of an essay titled “The Right’s Plan to Fix America: Patriarchy 2.0” writes that this neo-patriarchy encourages women to adopt “a family-first lifestyle, occasionally giving up formal careers in order to do so.” According to Beauchamp, this family structure is inherently oppressive:
If Americans are supposed to be having more kids, and American men are supposed to be more traditionally masculine, then who’s supposed to be doing the work of raising all of these kids? The answer, of course, is the wives (as it’s certainly not immigrants). Neopatriarchy may not explicitly call for a reversal of the feminist revolution, but that’s basically what it’s going for.
We must put aside for the moment the question of who is taking care of the children in the two-working parent families Beauchamp seems to prefer. (Spoiler alert: too often, it’s poor and underpaid immigrants, sometimes working in incredibly oppressive conditions. Structural inequality is not limited to the families Beauchamp doesn’t like.) Is it true that these mothers are left, 1950s style, to take on the entire enormous task of shepherding five or more children into adulthood alone while also managing all the concomitant household responsibilities?
The interviews in Pakaluk’s book make clear that the answer is a resounding “no.” As it turns out, doing a careful job raising five, six, seven, eight (or more) children into adulthood is a big enough task that it usually requires the active participation of both parents. As the book makes clear, most of the husbands of the women interviewed share the responsibilities of caring for children and of earning the money to pay for their family’s daily bread with their wives.
Although stay-at-home dads remain relatively rare, research by Pew shows that they are becoming more common, and they do appear in Pakaluk’s book. “Steph,” the mother of six children, is a pediatrician whose husband stays home with the kids. After Steph and her husband welcomed their fourth child, her dad’s health began to fail, and “somebody needed to be with him all the time.” So, the couple “thought about it and made the decision to have my husband stay home.” Steph’s family may be an outlier, but—as many of the other interviewees made clear—hands-on dads are typical for “neo-traditional” families with a male breadwinner as well.
This pattern fits other research. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed in a recent essay, both sociologist Brad Wilcox and demographer Lyman Stone have significant research finding that these types of households “show relatively egalitarian patterns of burden-sharing between spouses and strong paternal involvement in child rearing.”
Still, questions about these dads remain. How do they think about the division of labor in their families? If relevant, what does having a wife that works full- or part-time mean for them? Alternatively, for those husbands who bear the entire burden of breadwinning for a large family, how does that responsibility impact their mental state and decisions both at work and at home?
A Path to a Satisfying, Successful Life for Men
Pakaluk’s book offers fascinating insights into a kind of life where men are still succeeding. As Richard Reeves, a policy expert and founder of The American Institute for Boys and Men has written, men in the United States seem to be suffering from a “male malaise.” Reeves’ excellent book, Of Boys and Men, carefully documents this phenomenon. Men are falling behind on almost every possible important metric in the United States, including educational attainment, labor force participation, and family creation. In particular, the refusal or inability of many fathers to participate fully in the lives of their children has had devastating consequences. In her 2023 book, The Two Parent Privilege, economist Melissa Kearney persuasively argues that “children who grow up without two parents in their home are at a substantial disadvantage relative to kids who do.” America’s dads are too often failing not just in their professional lives but in their personal lives too, letting down their children and their children’s mothers.
The husbands of the women interviewed in Pakaluk’s book defy this trend. They are all married (definitionally, per the book’s parameters of study), and their wives report that their relationships are deeply satisfying, including sexually satisfying. One woman, “Miki,” reported that the lasting intimacy between her and her husband stemmed from her ability to “trust him with anything,” and their mutual lack of fear about bringing more children into the world. As one mom, “Eileen,” quipped near the book’s end, a big family reveals the men as “heroes” or “jerks.” It is clear that all of the women in this book would classify the fathers of their own children as “heroes”.
In addition to having satisfying marriages, many of the husbands of these women are successful enough in their careers to be the main breadwinner for their large families—even if their wives also contribute to the family income. “Terry,” a mother of ten, reported that “one thing I’ve noticed is my husband and men with large families, I feel they tend to be more successful at their jobs … Just because there’s that inward drive to provide.” Pakaluk observes that “Married men do tend to have higher incomes—and good evidence says their earnings are explained by working to provide rather than simply by the selection of higher-income males into marriage.”
Hannah’s Husband
What motivates these men to marry their wives, maintain loving relationships, and support their families in an era when many men do not? The book provides intriguing hints, but the only way to know is to interview these fathers, or others like them.
Such an inquiry would illuminate not only our understanding of fertility, but also our understanding of feminism, and what it means to advocate for the rights and interests of women. For decades, mothers of large families—especially non-wealthy mothers—have been viewed as inherently oppressed by their husbands and children. Indeed, Margaret Sanger, who helped develop the birth control pill, wrote that the key to poor women’s freedom was to limit family size, as “All of our problems are the results of overbreeding among the working class.”
Hannah’s Children shows us that it is possible to celebrate advancements in women’s rights, education, and career attainment while still recognizing that many mothers of large families are intelligent, thoughtful women with full agency who are choosing the lives that they live because of their deeply-held religious and moral beliefs. This is not to say that abuse and misogyny never occur in these kinds of families. It does, to be sure, although it’s worth noting that statistics tell us married women with kids are much less likely to experience domestic violence than unmarried women with children. But as Hannah’s Children makes clear, many modern mothers with numerous children are neither deserving of our pity nor our scorn. Indeed, I’d argue these women are deeply deserving of our respect, instead.
However, this story remains only partially told until we can hear from the fathers. Understanding what the lives of these wives are like—what their families are like—requires understanding their spouses, too.
Pakaluk named her book after the biblical Hannah. After years of infertility, God rewards Hannah’s faithfulness with a child, who will become the Prophet Samuel. After giving up Samuel to the priesthood when he was only three years old, Hannah is blessed with five more children. Hannah’s husband, Elkanah, is notable for his love for his wife, his faithfulness to God, and his decision to support Hannah in bringing their son as a small child to the temple to become a priest. Learning about the modern-day Hannahs is valuable. But we could do with learning more about the twenty-first century’s Elkanahs, too.
