🐣 The Case for Having Lots of Kids

In “Hannah’s Children,” an economist and mother of eight interviews highly educated women with large families—and examines the reasons for America’s declining fertility rate.

Arguments about fertility rates are often made in abstract economic terms, and for good reason: the abstraction is necessary to gloss over the topic’s natural awkwardness in a society where a woman’s reproductive future is generally considered a matter of personal freedom.

To say that any one person or family should have kids, or more of them, is to violate a cultural taboo. But Pakaluk goes for it, making the case that having kids is good, not just for individuals but for society. She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics.

She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes.

This is the case not just for adults but for children, as well: Pakaluk points out that kids who grow up with lots of siblings learn to share space, time, and stuff; they must tolerate people who are different in opinion and personality. “The family works against individualism by asserting a communitarian reality,” Pakaluk writes.

Pakaluk and her subjects are double outliers. She focussed on women who not only have more kids than most Americans but who also graduated from college. A number of her subjects have advanced degrees; Pakaluk herself has a Ph.D. from Harvard. She picked these women because she wanted to understand the trade-offs between work and family. Becoming a mother to many children wasn’t something they defaulted to but something they deliberately chose. It’s an unusual choice: according to a 2021 C.D.C. report, the average college-educated woman has roughly one fewer kid than the average high-school dropout.

Notably, all of the women interviewed are religious—mostly a mix of evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics, and Jews. A significant number of Pakaluk’s subjects went through a journey of conversion, whether they reached for a more observant life or rejected their own lonely single-child upbringings. They are self-consciously countercultural; they disliked the standard paths offered to educated women, and went after something radically different.

For example, many of them assert that an egalitarian split in parenting duties betweens moms and dads is often impossible, especially in the early days of a baby’s life. “We had this idea like it was going to be fifty-fifty,” one mother of five with a Ph.D. says. “We had to figure out how to let go of all of that,” and how to “embrace things that seemed stereotypically gendered,” she added. The women are also clear-eyed about the fact that pursuing advanced degrees and successful careers makes it harder to have a family. “College, medical school, law school, and the like don’t require lower fertility, they just eat up childbearing years,” Pakaluk writes. “The biological deck is stacked against you.”

For these women, giving up their individual freedom by having kids led them to a deeper sense of purpose and joy. As Pakaluk writes, “My subjects described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

🔗 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-case-for-having-lots-of-kids