I have written before about big families. I guess I am interested because I am from a “big” family myself: I am the fourth of five siblings. I have also operated my whole life, in some capacity or other, in homeschooling circles, where you are much more likely to encounter larger-than-average families. Between four of the siblings in my family, we will be welcoming cousins number twelve and thirteen this summer; I hope that my own kids can grow up in a larger family, with many loving (and at times, fighting!) sibling relationships. Finally, it does not take long reading a couple of history books to recognize that families today (even what we consider larger families) are on the small side compared to historical norms, where ten or twelve children were not unusual.
The Data Perspective
After watching the 2019 documentary Birthgap, I became aware of just how unusual my experiences with larger families were considering the plummeting birth rates of all industrialized nations. Director Stephen Shaw made a compelling case for the catastrophe that awaits any nation whose birth rate drops significantly below replacement, and he made some interesting observations about why adults are choosing—or not choosing, as he found—not to have children.
Interestingly, Shaw, a data scientist, discovered that the difference in family composition between now and fifty-sixty years ago is not mainly a difference in size—of people who have children, they continue to have about as many as they did before[1]—but a difference in kind: people are simply not starting families as much at all. In the film, Shaw interviews many people that he terms “involuntarily childless”—people that intended all along to have children someday but for whom that day never came around, until they found themselves without a partner and past childbearing age.
Many of these interviews are heartbreaking, especially interviews with elderly individuals who are left with no blood relatives to care for them or bring meaning to their last years. Shaw’s documentary poses valid and important questions about how to encourage young people to find a mate and make time for children early in life rather than waiting for some magic equilibrium to materialize between one’s career and personal life. He especially noted the need for women to see a viable way forward in pausing school or career to have children and not have it affect their future career possibilities dramatically.
While I agree with Shaw’s analysis in some areas and disagree in others, his research is certainly worth noting, and it has proven an interesting counterpoint to the research Catherine Pakaluk has documented in her 2024 book, Hannah’s Children.
The Personal Perspective
While Shaw examined the data on birth rates from the 30,000-foot level, analyzing data from dozens of countries over scores of years, Pakaluk, economics professor at the Catholic University of America, chose to zoom in with a qualitative study of fifty-five college educated women with five or more children. Shaw was driven by the desire to know why people are not having children. Pakaluk chose to approach the problem by wondering why some people are. Approximately five percent of American women have five or more children, and while Pakaluk’s work is not comprehensive enough to be a true sample size for this demographic, limiting her number of subjects enabled her to have one-on-one interviews with open-ended questions, resulting in eye-opening conversations about what motivates and sustains women with large families.[2]
She titled her book “Hannah’s Children” after the biblical figure Hannah[3] because she found that the women she interviewed were “women . . . like the biblical Hannah who see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing.”[4] Like the Hannah of the Bible, these women
were motivated by a deeply religious worldview characterized by trust in God and hope in his providence. Faith enabled and dignified costly personal sacrifices—enabled, these women argued, because the gains and losses of childbearing are assessed differently on religious grounds than on secular ones; dignified, they argued, because true wealth doesn’t come from what the world offers.[5]
Between quoting extensively from interviews and her more in-depth chapters of analysis, Pakaluk gives much rich material to contemplate in her work, and as a mother of small ones myself, I found it incredibly encouraging and inspiring. For this brief review, I will simply outline a few of the costs these women associated with having large families and reflect on the benefits these women gained.
Opportunity Cost
When tallying the costs of having several children, people may immediately think of financial demands. However, Pakaluk rightly assesses that the most significant increase in cost over the past century for having a family is in “opportunity cost.” Compared to one hundred years ago (when birth rates were much higher), women have far more options for how they will choose to live. They can choose to marry or not, and either way they can have a successful career purchased with successful schooling all the way through the post-doctorate level. What they generally cannot do is have a bustling, high-paying, successful career and have more than a couple kids. Choosing one will preclude the other. As Pakaluk notes so shrewdly, the way our society is organized, women are more or less funneled toward career and away from family without much conscious effort. She is worth quoting in full:
For most women, beginning with kindergarten there is an uninterrupted sequence of educational and pre-professional years leading inexorably to a job or career. Women begin their adult years having implicitly chosen not to have a child. Each year that they enjoy their studies, training, or work reinforces the value determination that “having a child would mean missing out on what I have come to know and love.” The trouble is, if children are in some way “experience” goods [meaning you do not know whether you will enjoy the experience until you have it] . . . women will not know in advance how much they might want what they are missing. The value of what they know—their social networks, their successes, their professional goals—easily outweighs the value of an unknown child.[6]
Choosing to have several children does involve a question of financial affordability, but more than that, couples—and especially women—must decide what they are willing to give up in way of lifestyle habits, leisure, success, and even shifts in identity, in order to have large families.
Benefits
So, what did these women find so valuable in having many children that tipped the scales for them? First, and as I noted earlier, all the women interviewed related their childbearing in some way to their faith. These women believed that their children were both a blessing to themselves, given from God, and a blessing to the world given from themselves. Children are seen as a gift both received and given.
These children blessed their mothers in the form of joy and growth. The joy children bring is an intuitive fact; through relationships with kids, we can experience the wonder of childhood over again. And somehow, kids are just fun. We like to hold babies, tickle toddlers, race preschoolers, and play chess with middle schoolers. The blessing of personal growth is less obvious but quickly felt in the first weeks of sleeplessly caring for your newborn around the clock: kids teach you to deny yourself and seek the good of another. The years of old-fashioned sanctification that can result from repeatedly putting another first is certainly a blessing.
However, what was especially intriguing to me in Pakaluk’s work was how these women described their children as a blessing to others—other members of the family (especially siblings) and potentially American society as a whole.
Pakaluk describes the phenomenon whereby, after the second or third child, additional children do not actually “cost” that much (remember the definition of “opportunity cost” above); she explains: “If the real cost of a child is what you give up to have one, that cost decreases with additional children after two or three. That’s because by then you’ve already given up most of what you will have to give up; only smaller, variable costs remain.”[7] On the flip side, Pakaluk “heard a story of increasing marginal benefits with more children. The rough idea was that the joy of an additional child reverberated among all the members of the family. . . . With more kids, there were more people to have and share the joy.”[8]
Pakaluk devotes two whole chapters to relaying stories of how the baby siblings of these large families blessed the older children and even neighborhood friends; as one mother related: “We would have people coming to our house just to see the baby just because they needed joy.”[9] Several mothers described how a new baby helped adolescent children through a season of depression or comforted a spouse after the loss of a family member or job. While it is common to assume that children add strain to marriage, some shared stories of how having another child healed their marriage, giving the couple a renewed sense of having a common goal and purpose. These tender stories showed a side of large-family life that revealed a blessing from these little ones to which outsiders are not usually privy.
Finally, throughout the book Pakaluk shares thoughts from mothers about how being raised in a large family is character-building for children and enables them to grow into the type of adults who will improve the shape of our society as a whole. Kids in large families grow up sharing rooms, sharing clothes, sharing time and attention; they have to relate to other siblings that may have very different personalities, preferences, and ways of communicating; they must develop a certain level of healthy independence so that younger siblings can receive the help they need, and often they learn to pitch in and help meet those needs themselves, thereby experiencing the joy—and difficulty—of serving another. These character qualities enable adults to enter into marriages more smoothly and with more success, to discipline themselves to turn passions into careers, to run just governments, and to grow productive and loving households themselves.
Conclusion
As industrialized nations’ populations plummet and succumb to increasing levels of entitlement, depression, and radical individualism, a book like Pakaluk’s is especially timely. The mothers she interviews candidly challenge the attitude we bring to planning our families and inspire us to choose a different path than simply comfort or ease—one of giving and growing to the glory of God.
[1] Shaw is mainly concerned with the decline over the past half-century; it is that demographic of which he can say that family size has not changed much. However, family size has changed significantly if you move the window of interest further back in history—much of the fall in birth rate occurred the hundred years before 1950.
[2] Pakaluk acknowledges that the cut-off of five children is arbitrary in some ways and that it necessarily excludes the experience of some couples that have the same child-welcoming mindset yet through life circumstances have fewer than five children or none at all (e.g., health of mother or infertility).
[3] After Hannah fulfilled her promise and brought Samuel to live in the temple, the Lord blessed her with five more children (1 Samuel 2:20–21).
[4] Catherine Pakaluk, Hannah’s Children: the Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (New York: Regnery Gateway, 2024), 57.
[5] Ibid., 14.
[6] Ibid., 147.
[7] Ibid., 149.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 297.
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