The social scientist Catherine Pakaluk, herself the mother of eight, traveled across the United States and interviewed fifty-five college-educated women who were raising five or more children. Through open-ended questions, she sought to understand who these women are, why and when they chose to have a large family, and what this choice means for them, their families, and the nation.
Hannah’s Children*is more than interesting stories of extraordinary women. It presents information that is urgently relevant for the future of American prosperity. Many countries have experimented with aggressively pro-natalist public policies, and all of them have failed. Pakaluk finds that the quantitative methods to which the social sciences limit themselves overlook important questions of meaning and identity in their inquiries into fertility rates. __ Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk
The trend in the US has seemed to be for more and more women to be childless by choice. College girls are indoctrinated into anti-natalism, and they believe they will have all the time in the world to change their minds. But their ovaries could tell them a different story.
Other women — mostly women of religious faith — are choosing to have many (five or more) children. The book “Hannah’s Children” by Catherine Pakaluk is their story.
Who is still having babies, and why? I traveled to ten American regions and interviewed college-educated women with five or more kids. Hannah’s Children presents a narrative account of my findings. What emerges is a portrait of an overlooked group of women whose motives and experiences have profound relevance for the crisis of low birth rates, as well as for the deeper public dialogue about who we are as a people.
The narrative approach revealed that women with large families may be outliers, but their behavior fits a normal framework of rational choice. Women had reasons for what they were up to—reasons that often dealt in higher things, like meaning and purpose. Their stories help explain why pro-natalist policies haven’t worked in the past. You can’t pay people enough to take on the life-altering costs of having children beyond their own level of demand for a child. Nations that want to turn the tide will have to do the harder work of freeing up the religious communities that nurture belief in the intrinsic value of children. I profile one case where a high demand for children was unrelated to biblical tenets. But for the rest, high demand for children was experienced initially as a religious conviction: children were the purpose of marriage and a blessing from God. If we want to see more children born in the future, we’ll need more women and men with such convictions.
___ Catherine Pakaluk Interview in City Journal
Podcast interview of the author by John J Miller: (12 1/2 minutes)
Schools and social media such as TikTok are indoctrinating young girls against getting married and having children. But that decision should not be based upon ideological indoctrination and brainwashing. The female brain and body evolved to have children. And some women will never be happy until they have several children, as Catherine Pakaluk discovered when she traveled the continent to interview such women.
Public schools shape a child’s values according to the thinking of bureaucrats and intellectuals, speaking for elites who want to rule the world. But the elitist world view of today is a freakish thing, and has nothing in common with the evolved human brains — male and female. The elitist world view is devised and propagated solely for the benefit of stratospheric level elites, and not for you and your children. Unless you want to turn the world back into a feudal society of serfs and lords, you had best wake up. And in order to see that your children are awake as well, pay very close attention to what other people are inserting into their minds.
Children are very suggestible, and schoolteachers and professors take advantage of that suggestibility when they indoctrinate and brainwash children and youth.
In order to see that the brainwashing doesn’t take, you must make sure that children read their 10,000 books by the age of 21. Consider Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk as one of them.
The common element that Catherine Pakaluk usually found in large families was a strong religious faith. The type of religion might vary from Roman Catholic to Jewish to Mormon etc., but a strong connection to a higher power and a higher power’s will was important to most large families.
In both North America and in Europe there is a strong fascination with the idea of large families, which reflects the strong residual minority of religious families that still exist in those places.
It is crucial for readers to understand, however, that a strong feeling of connection to a higher purpose is a spiritual phenomenon, which does not require religion. If a couple is committed to having a large family, they are not required to convert to a religion before they can build their lives. Spiritual commitment to that degree, without religion, is more rare however. Trust is crucial.
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