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Lessons From Large Families Defying The Collapsing Birth Rate with Dr. Catherine Pakaluk · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Childbearing, having children, is one of the available forms of human excellence. And it can be pursued, right, as a form of excellence. In the same way that someone could be a mountaineer or a great NBA player, parenting is a unique kind of excellence. And then once you get there, of course, you realize, well, this is an excellence available to everybody if they choose to see it that way. Yeah.
• 0:25
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited today to be joined by Katherine Pakalik. Katherine wrote a book, this amazing book. I'm going to put it up here on the screen for you guys on YouTube. Hannah's Children.
• 0:55
  The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Deerth. Catherine is a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. So you guys who follow the podcast know that there's few things that fascinate me more than trying to understand what is happening to sort of fertility. How do we think about the decision to have children?
• 1:15
  And how that has been changing. And so what this book does is it goes, Catherine does a ton of research and interviews women who have five or more children. And so, Catherine, I'd love for you just to describe a little bit about the thesis of the book, like what brought you to want to write this book and then give everyone kind of the big picture of what you were studying.
• 1:34
  Right. So the premise of the book, we've got this kind of crisis when economists, right? It's this crisis of low birth rates. Economists have been studying birth rates for a long, long time. And in some sense, you could say it's a pretty bread and butter issue for economists. And you think of someone like Thomas Malthus and go back to, you know, things like economics of doom and gloom. And, you know, usually people like Malthus, you know, we think about economists being kind of paranoid or obsessed with there being too many people.
• 2:01
  Yes. But as we know here and your audience, the real crisis in births has been too few births for a long time now, not just recently. I mean, we can get into that kind of the inflection points and where that changes. But I kind of surveyed, you know, I mean, economists and working pretty broadly in a bunch of areas. And I was thinking like, how can I make a contribution to this discourse? And so this is like a simple premise. The idea was,
• 2:26
  One of the ways that social science in general gets off the rails and the study of births, no less, is by focusing exclusively on averages, right? On the kind of like, what's the stock trend of society? What's everyone doing? And of course, there's no such thing as what everyone's doing. There's only just ways of measuring the average. And so, right, so the average number of births.
• 2:47
  per family is trending down. And so everybody's just kind of like scrambling on focusing on that and I thought, why don't we just look at the people whose births are not trending down, right? There are some families out there, and when I started I didn't know how many, but it's a pretty sizable number that are not trending down. And that's certainly my family. I think it might be your family as well. Yeah, we have five kids, yeah.
• 3:07
  Right. And so, you know, there's like a simple question, which forms the basis of the research question. Is it like not relevant that there are some people like you or like me that have kind of more than normal numbers of children? Is that kind of like just this one off? There's a whole bunch of these one offs out there. Or as I sometimes say, like, suppose we went around and talked to all those people.
• 3:28
  would we find out that they just all have purple birthmarks? Or there are people with this kind of weird, almost hereditary predilection for having children, and therefore completely not relevant for how we think about the birth dearth, the crisis of births. My hunch was that actually we might learn some really important things. And of course, we could get into what some of those things might be. But the final way to kind of explain this premise for the book
• 3:55
  In other words, we can learn about falling birth rates by talking to people whose birth rates are stable and in some cases have risen. But I think just to make it really concrete or practical, step out of the birth rate idea for a minute and think about health and fitness. Imagine thinking about how to solve a country with a health and wellness crisis, whether it's mental health, physical health. And all you did was study people who have a problem.
• 4:22
  You learned nothing from the people who had kind of turned their lives around. And actually, as soon as you say that, you realize, yeah, that's kind of weird, right? It would be very, very odd to only study people suffering a problem. And so you've got all these people running around who you say, well, wait a second. Like, I used to be unwell, and now I'm well. I got well. I changed my life. I can't avoid on my social media these terrific threads, you know, written by people who...
• 4:47
  were unfit and had become fit, you know, used to eat badly, now eat well, you know, and certainly there's a lot of approaches to that, but they're all sort of here to say, here's something that works. So go back to the births. You know, the whole question is, are there people who have figured out what works and are, are there stories relevant for these policymakers? You know, some of them certainly just coming into Washington, but of course around the world, there are policymakers in every country right now, scratching their heads trying to figure out how can we get people to have more births.
• 5:16
  So I thought these stories would be very relevant to that. So that's probably the premise, right? Is what can you learn about falling births by studying people who are having kids? So good. Why not do the research? And that's a great analogy because, yeah, to your point, every time I hear about countries that are trying to deal with this at the policy level, it does seem like they're shooting in the dark. They're not starting from what you're doing and saying, okay, where is this actually working and how do we understand this?
• 5:40
  They're like, no, if we just give a tax credit, we can just kind of manipulate people's decision to have children based on just small little policy tweaks that we can do from the seat of government. And so you studied this. You're like, OK, if we really wanted to be honest about what it takes to increase the birth rate, why do women choose to have more children? What were some of the big findings in the research?
• 6:02
  Yeah. Well, so we, you know, I suppose if you asked the guy in the street, you said, well, you know, where could I look to find some people who are still having a lot of kids? You know, most people would recognize that birth rates are a bit higher among religious communities, of all faiths, but religious communities. But they wouldn't really know where to go from there. What does that look like? Is that something that's kind of like being old-fashioned? Yeah.
• 6:25
  Is it sort of like a traddy thing? Or is it a rejection of family planning or being modern or something like that? Or worse, right? Is it like cult-like behavior or patriarchal behavior? You know, think about all those things. And so that was kind of the thing to dig into. So I believed that faith would be a part of that story. But the question was kind of like,
• 6:44
  What does that look like concretely? Like, what do people say about that? How do they get there? Are they people who always from a young age wanted to have lots of kids? Are they people who maybe converted to wanting those things? So, yeah, so, you know, that's kind of like in a nutshell. What I found was that, in fact, more than half of my sample were not people who grew up in large families.
• 7:04
  That quite like anything else that's interesting in life, you find some people who maybe from a young age were exposed to this way of life and thought it was great. People like I did. I grew up in a big family and I thought kids were great. I thought like, well, obviously they're a great part of life. And, you know, as soon as you're able to have children, you should kind of like make a big part of carve out time and space to do that. But of course, then I met all these women who like didn't grow up that way at all.
• 7:29
  and who maybe had religious conversions met people who were doing this, and they thought, hey, well, I could have just one more. And then they have one more. I could have another one. And there's this kind of like tipping point. Like one lady said, you know, I don't know when we sort of tipped over into this place of like, gosh, there's lots of them, but it had been kind of one at a time. But by and large, what I'm describing is really a story of agency and a story of purpose. Yeah.
• 7:53
  So not people who are just sort of backwards and reject modern technology, not people who are kind of forced into it by patriarchal pastors or rabbis or husbands even, but actually really interesting story of meaning and purpose. And so, you know, the goal then was to kind of present that to the reader, put some flesh on that, literally give it words, because of course, from different faith backgrounds, it looks and sounds differently. So it's pretty neat. It was a really, really great project. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 8:20
  Yeah. So actually diving into what you found, and it probably isn't too surprising to people listening to this that faith has a big part of this. But I imagine that's going to have somewhat of a discouraging or chilling effect on policymakers. How do they respond when they hear you say, hey, this is the causation chain that we're discovering creates large numbers?
• 8:45
  Right, right. Well, first of all, it takes a minute to get this message in there. And I'm kind of working on that. But in part, this is kind of the end result of, I think you alluded to before, there was just a standard playbook. And the playbook for policymakers is this kind of standard, like, nudge playbook. Yes. You know, mostly we just think of subsidies, tax and transfer schemes. It's just our standard playbook. Right. Actually, I mean...
• 9:10
  I'm not, you know, I'm not a big fan of that kind of nudge playbook, but it works pretty well for certain things, right? Like, if you want to get people to not buy as much gasoline, well, you could do it, you know? Like, you go to California, everyone's like, oh, I'm moving away from a gasoline-powered car. I'm going to go...
• 9:27
  If you can make the price of a gallon of gas higher, you could get people to substitute away from that. You know, we could go on and on. I mean, there's a million ways in which, you know, you can do this. So I think part of it's just this is the ordinary playbook for the policymaker is to use these financial measures.
• 9:44
  Or, you know, this is sort of standard. I just watched a news program this morning about the tariff situation. And the general thought is like, okay, if you tax something, you'll get less of it. So if you subsidize it, you'll get more of it. It works pretty well, whether it's a good idea or not. So it's the standard playbook is the first thing. Yeah.
• 10:00
  The second thing is that what I'm asking policymakers to do is think about, which I think is a hard thing to do, to think about family policy, if you will, in a much broader way, right? So what we have is like we have all of our policy. Well, maybe not anymore. We got all these bureaus are kind of coming down, I guess, or they're all going to get rearranged. Right, as we speak.
• 10:24
  But we have, you know, we have our education policy over here, we have our family policy over here, labor policy over here. And in reality, of course, like human beings are these integrated, interesting beings. Of course, we're embedded in families that are complicated and interesting. And so what I'm kind of saying is like, hey, maybe your education policy is really a significantly important, vital part of your family policy.
• 10:48
  Or maybe your religious liberty policy is a huge part of it or could be thought of as a huge part of your family policy. So that's what I'm trying to say. And then they're like, oh, what do we do with that? You know, what do we do with that? Are you saying, you know, we're supposed to make people religious? Well, no, I'm not saying that. That's the job of church communities, faith communities to spread their mission. But the question is, like, how hard are you making it for them to do their work? That's right. The whole concept. That's something that I think it's a great moment to talk about.
• 11:17
  We've got a lot of examples of what, like, so if, you know, 10 years ago, if you said, hey, look, the government's, you know, in lots and lots of ways crowding out the work of churches, does not view churches as fundamentally a source of a really vital public good, right? So, if, like, if church communities, religious communities are a source of children, or source of, let's say, even, you know, stable marriages,
• 11:43
  Well, then you have to view your churches not as some kind of superfluous, like, identity thing, like, those people like that church or those people like that church. Actually, what you need to do is, like, call in all your people in D.C. and think, like, okay, what kind of fence do we need to build around this?
• 11:58
  We need to keep the bullies out. We need to keep the wolves away from the sheep. You know, what are the ways in which we're really like, we're not intending to, but we're kind of harassing these people. Are we forcing them to comply with things we shouldn't be? So that's a whole other, whereas generally speaking, we think of religious liberty as like a constitutional thing. Right. Of course, it is a constitutional thing. But once you say that, it sounds like you're in this kind of libertarian space of just letting people be free to do what they want to do.
• 12:27
  But what I'm trying to get through to people is like, no, actually, there's a substantive ground to religious liberty, right? There's something you can't get from anywhere else. Right. Yes. Yeah. And that's what has always made America kind of unique, I feel like, especially in the Western world, just –
• 12:44
  And I've heard too that this, I don't know how much you've kind of compared our statistics to Israel. I've widely heard that Israel is one of the, maybe the only developed nation in the world with above replacement fertility rate. And I've lived there and you see how much...
• 13:03
  the religious culture is woven into all of society in Israel. And it's growing. Those are the communities that are having the most children. You can see where their future is headed demographically, whereas in these countries where religion has just been decimated in Europe and places like Japan, the birth rate is just in a dismal place. And free fall. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, I think we've got a lot of
• 13:28
  potential policymakers, would-be policymakers in D.C. right now, and some new ones coming in, who are certainly interested in thinking about the problem. And the fact that these kind of, well, I could say, we'll say until recently, some of these kind of darlings of the religious right, I would say like Hungary, Hungary has done all of these really big prenatal things. But these things have really failed, and it's become clear in the last, you know, maybe 12 to 15 months, like Hungary's births are down like 9% in the last year.
• 13:57
  For a little bit there, I think, you know, maybe five or 10 years, it was like, well, this is what we ought to be doing. We ought to be doing like family policy, like Hungary's family policy. I didn't think it was going to work, but now we know it didn't work. So there is kind of a back to the drawing board thing to do. I mean, listen, I'll just go out and say, look, I mean, I think families are taxed too much. So if you want to give them a bigger child tax credit, they're not going to get in your way. Right.
• 14:21
  But I don't think that's going to turn the birth rate around. It might be a nice thing to do for families, which is a thing we ought to do if we can afford it. But it won't be pronatalist, I think. Right. You make the point that if you were to, I think, subsidize ultramarathoning, you're not going to get tons more ultramarathoners, which you will support. It would be appreciated by that community. You might put a few people.
• 14:45
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• 14:59
  You and I kind of are hitting the same issue from two different angles. So I've been very, you know, I've written a couple of books on and have really primarily, I would say, think about this from the perspective of a father who doesn't want to have a large family because I was in that position. And then I had a major change of heart and mind. And I would say just temperamentally, I'm definitely the kind of guy that would be built to have a small family.
• 15:24
  And so the decision to have a large family had to come from a place of purpose and mission and not simply like a preference. And I think that, you know, as you were describing, I kind of wanted to take a look at one of the things that you wrote. You talked a lot about the why. And one of the things I love about the book is you have all these stories of women who are.
• 15:45
  who are articulating that it's really a purpose, a reason. And you use this analogy of like Kobe Bryant had an injury and he's basically like, I couldn't even feel it. I was just so into the game. And this is sort of analogous to if you feel very little purpose, it won't take much annoyance. Baby crying at night before you're like, what am I? My life's over. Like, I hate I hate my life.
• 16:07
  If you feel like you're in the NBA finals game, you're going to have a different emotional reaction to those things. And so you wrote, the women defying the birth, their death had a reason to have children big enough to give up their lives more than once or twice. And that reason came from deep trust in God or love for their spouse or love for their children. Often all three, like Bryant had said, when the game is more important than the injury itself, it's...
• 16:30
  you don't feel that damned injury. That's a great point. You heard this over and over again, you know, purpose or kind of the quote, those who know why can bear almost any how, how do you see that playing into the way that these women decided to have more children?
• 16:44
  Yeah, a thousand percent. I mean, to me, there were, I tried to put all of the most salient quotes in the book, but I think, I really think that once you put it in those terms, you know, appealing to the Kobe Bryant story, I really think this is the way people are able to get inside of what's going on here. It is the bridge, right? So I've had a lot of really interesting engagement from people I would call like typically on the left, center left, not especially religious. And as soon as you put it that way, they get it, you know, like,
• 17:12
  people who climb mountains and people like they obviously are doing something that's incredibly physically mentally taxing. And so first of all, what you have to see is like childbearing, having children is one of the available forms of human excellence. And it can be pursued in the same way that someone could be a mountaineer or a great NBA player. The thought is no one thinks of childbearing in that way. They don't think of it as a distinct form of human excellence.
• 17:40
  And there's so much to unpack around that, right? Like people think of parenting as a kind of state, not as a skill. Yes. Right. And of course, they don't think you can get better at it, right? So this contributes to a lot of people giving up at the beginning, right? Because they think like, well, this is so hard. But it doesn't stay that hard. It doesn't stay permanently that hard. In fact, you can get to the point, and I assume if I ran marathons at all, which I don't, I assume that people who go out and run, you know, 10 miles on a weekend, right?
• 18:09
  And it's not just like pure pain the whole way. I assume that at some point you get to that point where there's some exhilaration and there's a lot of deep pride and satisfaction and seeing that your body can become such an excellent machine, can perform, and it's going to be mind and body and spiritual. And that, wow, what you're pulling out of these interviews is actually mothering. Now, I actually think fathering too. That's hopefully the next book, but-
• 18:35
  That mothering is this type of thing. Parenting is a unique kind of excellence. And then once you get there, of course, you realize, well, this is an excellence available to everybody if they choose to see it that way, to join in, to participate. And that I think the basic principles that we were able to cover in the book and outline them, I think, you know, things like what? Like three is the hardest number of kids to have.
• 18:58
  Yes. It's like, you know, for some people it was two and for some people it was four, but like, it's not nine, right? It's not nine. Actually, nine is easy, it turns out. And a lot of the journalists I've talked to who are not from this world, in particular, like, I'm just thinking of one I had recently, Josie Enzer from the Times of London. I mean, she's like, give me, like, help me out with this. How can it be the case that eight is not hard? Well, there's all of that stuff. So these are principles like, okay, just like there's a science of, you know,
• 19:27
  fitness, there's a science of mountaineering, I take it, science of marathoning. There is a science to parenting that relates to the acquisition of these kinds of skills. And that's just like great news. Like you're sitting around thinking like, how can we help people to see not only the value of this activity, but also to kind of make it more accessible mentally, they can look at it. Well, it's a lot better if you think of it from that perspective.
• 19:53
  Yes, that takes that paradigm shift. I think, you know, when you think about Kobe Bryant, part of the reason why he can fight through an injury is he's got 50,000 fans who are screaming, this is really valuable. And I feel like for a lot of women, this is really tough. They feel alone. Is anybody? And then, of course, if they sense somehow that the opposite is happening, like people are booing them from the stands while they have children.
• 20:18
  This is why asking the very simplistic question, a lot of people, when they hear any conversation around this, they're like, you guys just be quiet. People are going to have as many kids as they want. And don't say anything about that. It's a personal choice. And I'm like, that is so simplistic.
• 20:33
  On our family, you know, I really feel like we experienced this. You know, we have four daughters and when our oldest, when she had our first grandchild, you know, our family, I sometimes I think about this, like, you know, in culture, we value children at maybe a two or three. And when I see a family, you know, really striving to have kids, I'm like,
• 20:52
  Maybe they value kids at a four or five. I feel like our family values kids at like a nine or a 10 just because it was so, it's almost impossible to express the amount of collective joy bringing that generation into the world created in our family. It was like a bomb of joy went off. You would think that Kelsey had won the Super Bowl.
• 21:12
  Felt all of that from her grandparents, from her parents. All the family was just like, you are a superhero in this family. That's so great. And so, but that's a different experience. I think most women. And so when you ask the simplistic question, like, do you want to have kids? In an environment in which we are booing from the stands. Right.
• 21:31
  While you're trying or an environment in which everyone's just cheering you on and saying what you're doing is so meaningful to think that this is just a personal decision that has no implication or isn't being impacted by your preferences are somehow being impacted by the messages that you're taking. That just seems sort of simplistic. Have you found that that? Yeah. How did that impact these women? Yeah.
• 21:52
  Oh, yeah. Well, as you saw from the book, one of the questions I asked them all was like, what's the most memorable comment you remember receiving? Either positive or negative, but sadly, most of the most memorable comments are negative ones. People approaching them, like you're saying, they're just getting booed. People say, are those all your kids? Can I ask why? Why would you have them all? In front of your children, right? Of course, you're like, well, obviously, have you seen them? They're amazing. Yes.
• 22:16
  No, that's why I have these children. You know, you should be spayed or, you know, things like that. You're ruining the planet. You know, you hear all those things. But I would say on a deeper level, the women talked a lot about the heartache of feeling not understood either by friends or coworkers or in some extreme and sad cases by their own families, right? Because some of them who converted, especially religious conversions, occasionally that came along with feeling estranged from their parents.
• 22:44
  or at least an initial misunderstanding. There are also some nice cases where initially the grandparents, you know, would say like, well, we can't keep, we can't keep giving you money. For instance, the grandparents think it's about like, oh, we'll get, you know. And so initially there's kind of, but then, and like, they start to see, oh no, you're really committed to this. And then they've got this batch of grandkids who just love them. And all of a sudden they come around, they soften on that. So all of those stories are meaningful and important, but I agree with you.
• 23:14
  A thousand percent. We heard a lot of stories about, you know, like the messaging women remembered getting in college, usually again fairly negative, but also like some of the positive stories, these women who had come out of, we'll say families and extended families where childbearing was loved and welcomed.
• 23:31
  So your core message or core idea there that kind of like we shouldn't speak about this kind of human excellence, the joys of parenting, like the satisfactions on the grounds that kind of we wouldn't want to influence people's choices or we ought not influence people's choices. To my mind, that's not just – it's not just sort of insane. It's inhumane too, right? It's inhumane. Because I think that most people, certainly people I interviewed and I would say certainly true for myself –
• 24:00
  they feel evangelistic about it. You've kind of discovered something you think a lot of people haven't discovered. Like, actually, this is, like, I could just weep at the thought of what my life would be like without any one of my children. And so I think, like, well, I'm so glad I made that decision to have them. I mean, it could have gone either way, but I went in this way. And then I think, well, I look around and I think, well...
• 24:25
  What if nobody told me? Like, what if I didn't know it was great? And so I think, like, what can I do to tell people how great it is, right? Because I wouldn't want to – and precisely because you think you found, like, the pearl of great price. You think you found something great. So what kind of an inhumane person would you have to be if you thought you'd discover something amazing and then just to shut up about it? You don't tell anybody. Yes. It's so bizarre that we need almost a PR campaign.
• 24:51
  because it has been so denigrated. The brand of having children has taken such a hit. You were mentioning kind of education and how, yeah, what is this? Are we subtly sending messages just the way we educate? I saw this video went viral on X a few days ago where a teacher took pictures from all of her first-grade kids, something like maybe their first-grade kindergartners, and she used AI.
• 25:18
  to take a picture, like basically generate an image of them in their preferred occupation or career. So like them as an astronaut or them as a veterinarian or whatever they were. And the kids were just so excited. And this was being so celebrated on X, like, look at these kids and you saw their face just lighting up. And I think it is a really interesting use of AI. And I think I just, I, I retweeted, just sort of posted,
• 25:43
  Now, now take a pic, now generate an image of them, you know, with married with five kids. Yeah. You know, like we can't, we don't, we never encourage children. We spend 12 years in education encouraging children to think about themselves as an individual, to prepare them for a career as an individual. This sort of real disconnect with children.
• 26:04
  The future of being a father or mother, I've never seen it be so distant, so clear that we're so focused on that individual. And so decisions or identities that a child might be kind of playing with, they could basically end the possibility that they could someday be a father or mother.
• 26:23
  It's almost like that's not even considered as a potential negative. It's like, it's, yeah, that's kind of an odd choice that they might choose someday way into the future. But right now, what we care about is who do you want to be as an individual? And then what do you want to be when you grow up? Your identity is going to be formed purely as an individual. You wrote this. I wanted to read this section. This is the part that I enjoyed the most. This is kind of halfway through the book. You were describing as women were...
• 26:49
  Talking through the process or the kind of the language around giving up your independence as a mother. And you said, Esther, less talkative than Hannah throughout, offered one of the pithiest examples we had heard. It gives us structure and allows us to grow and feel connected to something higher than ourselves, at the same time allowing room for each individual person's contribution and experience.
• 27:09
  Hannah and Esther seem to be getting a team analogy. Any one player is tied into the team, makes commitments, loses some freedom, and accepts being one with the others. But the team makes you who you are. Without the team, you can't be good at your sport. The catcher can't be a catcher without the pitcher, nor the quarterback, a quarterback without a receiver. Part of what, so we started this family teams thing. In part, because I think that,
• 27:32
  Mothers oftentimes feel like by having a child, you're now on an island and you're no longer connected to a larger team. I think that is really, really hard for mothers. And I think that the way that men who just seem to me to be so built to coach teams and be involved in teams, um,
• 27:51
  We don't usually bring that into the family. And I think that this analogy is probably, for me, the key analogy for understanding the positive argument for a large family. In other words, if your family is just a group of individuals and every time a new child comes in, they get a smaller and smaller slice of the same fixed pie. Mm-hmm.
• 28:09
  then the argument for sibling rivalry or for why you don't have a smaller family seems to prevail. But if you think about your family as a team and that every single time you have a new child, you're bringing a new team into the world, new team member. Teams get excited when they recruit a new player. It's a very different way of thinking. And so you were teasing this out, and it seems like some of the women that you knew.
• 28:28
  talk, you really saw this. I'm on a team and we're bringing members into the team. Instead of just bemoaning the lack of my personal independence, it's the celebration of me participating in this team environment.
• 28:40
  Right. Yeah, I think that's that's spot on. I mean, I think we even before you get to the kids, I think a lot of people view marriage in that individualistic way. Right. They they kind of measure up if they're happy in marriage on the basis of like looking inside, you know, my own growth and my own like purpose or something, which I don't think really contributes to marital happiness or success in the long run.
• 29:02
  And then, of course, you can extend that out to the children. I mean, my husband looked at me the other day. I kind of laughed at him because I thought it was silly, but I think it gets at what you're saying. He said something like, we were in Houston, Texas. I was giving a talk on the book, and things went beautifully well, and there's hundreds of people. It was great. And he just said, gosh, I'm so happy that you're flourishing. He said, we have this beautiful family, but he's like, but more than that, you're just doing well. Yeah.
• 29:27
  And I think he meant that spiritually, physically, fashionably for what that's worth today. And then he said something like, you know, who'd want to get married to not flourish? He said, but, you know, that he said something like, it's to my credit, you know, like he's proud that I'm doing well. Yeah. Because he feels like, well, he hasn't like sapped me or made me worse. And I think that's what you're getting at. It's really beautiful. Mm-hmm.
• 29:49
  And then, of course, extend that to the kids. And I think what you just, that passage you just read, I think, you know, it's hard for me. Like most of these passages are emotional. Whenever I hear them, I get a little bit emotional. But I'm thinking too about those passages in the later part of the book where the moms talked about the unexpected and shocking way that they're,
• 30:09
  seventh, eighth, or ninth children, like contributed to the rest of the team, so to speak. So, you know, like really intense. It's really intense. And if you haven't seen it happen, you could almost not believe it could happen. Yes. Yeah. I certainly feel that way. We were so grateful to have our fifth and would have loved to keep going, but we were unable. It was...
• 30:29
  Such a blessing, each one. And now on this side, I think part of our experience has been too. So now that we have adult children who are married and now we have three grandchildren, part of that team environment for us has continued. Like we do so much with our kids and we're involved in their businesses. They're involved in ours. We do ministry together. We're all part of the same church. It doesn't have to end. And so much of the way that we've tried to work through this is,
• 30:55
  The idea of the nest versus team, we see this as like, these are the two biggest analogies. And the idea that the family is a nest sort of, it sort of hints at the idea that it self-destructs every generation. And a team, as soon as your kids are adults, the ability to continue to work together or interact, I think it's difficult because a lot of people...
• 31:16
  do sort of think about themselves as nurturing a nest. And the team does self-destruct when their kids become adults. And so I think if you see a pattern like that, it can be difficult, especially this is where I think I get a lot of the men. Well, I've discovered a lot of men struggle with having a large family is the
• 31:33
  temporary nature of it. And so if you experience a much more durable kind of family, then I think it's very exciting for both the husband and wife to be a part of it. One of the other elements that you started teasing out here that I've thought a lot about and wanted to get your take on, you know, so the idea of roles in the family is always kind of considered somewhat of a taboo topic. And I think that one of the things that, because if you think about, you know,
• 31:57
  If the ultimate value is freedom, and what we're trying to do is maximize individual liberation for each person, their ability to experience their own individual self-expression, then roles in the family feel very constraining on that highest value. If you think of yourself as a part of a team,
• 32:13
  Yeah. Roles are like exciting. And it's like, I just want to find out which one I'm in. Like you were just describing with your husband. He doesn't lose because you're succeeding. It's like our team is winning right now. And I'm so excited that our team is winning. Yeah. You wrote, childbearing as a purpose of family life implied a set of norms about how to live, including openness to children and trust in God's provision. These in turn require
• 32:34
  The definite roles be filled mothers toward children, fathers toward supporting the family, children towards each other. Taking together these roles gave their marriages and families more the character of an institution than a set of relationships. So there's a sense in which we're building something that, like I said, is going to outlast something that's just sort of temporary or disposable. How have you seen the way that these women thought about roles? Maybe that's contrast to the way that we tend to think of in our culture today.
• 33:01
  Yeah, for sure. So roles. I mean, I could point to one of the early chapters that might be like chapter seven, Mickey. She says something kind of quirky at the end of her interview. She's someone who comes from like a really academic background and she was probably pretty progressive and through the course of getting married and having kids. Yeah.
• 33:18
  I didn't really interview people about their political opinions, but she had clearly become a little bit more traditional. And she said something like, looking back, she said, when my husband and I got married, we kind of agreed to do everything very egalitarian, like down the middle. And she said, when I look at it now, I'm kind of surprised at how traditional our family life looks. And I think they had five when I was expecting her fifth when I interviewed her. So that's kind of that idea, like without even intending it, kind of like water flows downhill. Mm-hmm.
• 33:47
  And what I tried to get at there was this idea that like if there's a lot of kids around, there is a way in which nature calls forth a certain kind of a certain set of roles. And they're not accidental, right? It can't be that like the dad gets pregnant and has the kids, right? That isn't going to work out. So if it's the mom who's having the children, right? There's a sense in which like now I'll use a different word, but it's related to role. She's specializing in that.
• 34:14
  So for me as an economist, this is like really natural. We think about, like, why is it that we'll say teams and we'll say more people, if you can get more people involved in the production of something, why is it that that, why is it you get more out of that group? Well, you get more only if they specialize.
• 34:32
  Because what happens is like we naturally get pretty good at the thing we're specializing in. So sure, like, you know, there's going to be some cases where maybe things are a little upside down and the one who's specializing in giving birth is also specializing in breadwinning. But ordinarily speaking, that's really not what nature provided for us. So then, yeah, then, so this is like basically what's describing, what you're describing. So if you just have one child family, maybe two, you actually don't have to specialize that much.
• 35:01
  So you can actually stick to a little bit more of the psychic allergy. You do some of this, you do some of that, and we'll split everything up down the middle. But I thought this was kind of a nice way to push back on that because, like you say, the sense is, if you're playing a role, it's really restrictive. But there is a much different and better way of thinking about a role, which is the greater prosperity you have when everybody...
• 35:26
  is able to sort of produce more and then exchange it in a sense right in a family there's no like we're not doing contractual exchanges like i'm not selling my babies to my husband and he's not you know trading it for breadwinning right and and actually understanding the nature of those kind of those that kind of sharing that's part of the project yes because you could argue that um
• 35:49
  Along with that kind of individualized sense, like I evaluate how I'm doing on the basis of me. It really borrows a lot from an economic mode and not from this familiar mode. So it's really terribly helpful to show how actually certain principles that are true in economics can hold in the family. But the basis isn't contractual exchange. The basis is sharing a whole life together.
• 36:12
  Yeah, I think this is what's so dangerous in a kind of consumer economy where everyone is seen or they're identified through what they consume or what they produce. It creates, especially if it's all determined monetarily, that's how I determine my value.
• 36:27
  This really is hard on mothers because when they do make sacrifices at the economic level to bless their family, then instead of it being seen as, wow, this is like the whole point. Like this is what's providing the most meaning. Like I'm just out there working so that we can.
• 36:42
  flourish as a family, but you're actually building and raising the family. And so you have to believe that at a deep level. Otherwise you are clearly undermining this division and you're both sort of negotiating for who can give the family the least, which I think happens in a lot of families. And it does make sense why at that point you would consider each child to be a giant liability as opposed to an incredible asset. So taking something away.
• 37:07
  Yes. Man, that's challenging. Well, you wrote something that I've thought about a lot recently, which is the healing power of an infant in the home. Just before I came here, I was holding one of my granddaughters. That's great. And, you know, I realized that I, growing up, I almost...
• 37:25
  I remember almost no babies around me as I was growing up. And so I just began to expect or think that the life was normal with, with no infants, no babies. And then ever since we started having kids and being around young families and now our grandchildren, I'm watching women in an environment where they're constantly for decades, over decades with infants. And I'm, and you wrote something. I was like, I just started having this thought and then you, you wrote this and I was like, I'm like,
• 37:53
  We need to talk about this. Adults with one or two children will spend no more than 5% of their adult lives with an infant under one year old and no more than 20% with a child under five. Today's typical middle school, high school, or college student will never have lived in the same house with a human infant. And if so, will not remember it. In contrast, the mothers and fathers in my sample are spending 20 or 30 years with a child under the age of five.
• 38:18
  And their children are growing up with babies in the house. So you were talking about, is this some kind of like hidden maybe route to a lot of the mental illness we're seeing? So yeah, talk to me a little bit more. Yeah, I mean, this hit me like a true discovery in a sense. I mean, it's not something I ever really thought about before I did this research. And those last sections of the book were kind of saved for things I couldn't not write about. The main parts of the book are sort of the answer to that research question, why do people have these kids?
• 38:46
  And it was like, before I finished, like, I can't not say these things. And so, yeah, man, it just jumped out at me. Like, what is going on here? And kind of the basic thought that women... And by the way, it's not like I asked anybody for these stories. It was like, these are things that came out in the process of just letting people talk about the great things that came to their lives from having children. A remarkable number, I think it was like 20% of the people I talked to,
• 39:14
  had a story of a baby coming into the home at a time when either one of the kids or one of the adults was really struggling with a particular problem, some depression, anxiety, and that the baby had really improved things in a dramatic way. So much so that for some of the women, the stories were sort of like, well, and then after that happened, we thought, well, we could just have as many more children as we could because the baby's never going to be the problem. The baby's going to be the solution. Yeah.
• 39:41
  So people use language like holding an infant is like being in a sun under a sun lamp. You know, and I thought, oh, that is interesting, right? So we have this idea that if you get more vitamin D, we're sun. Right. This is protect. You know, we use the language. It's protective. It's not like a cure, but it's like it's protective against depression, anxiety. So basically, I wrote it down because it was so powerful. So it came out over and over and over. I thought this can't be an accident.
• 40:07
  And then I thought, well, surely there's some research on this. Surely somebody's researched, you know, whether having human infants around is sort of protective against these mental illnesses. And of course, like, no, there's not lots of research. So I'm something I'm really hoping either I can inspire the right people to research this better. I mean, look, from a research perspective, I'll just get the problem on the table. The kind of the gold standard in academic research is to do a kind of experimental design. We can't.
• 40:37
  We can't distribute babies to people to do this experiment. So we'll have to wait for some people, maybe I'll get my hands on it, to do a little bit of what we call quasi-experimental looking at this. But it's like we have this, like Jonathan Haidt's work on the anxious kids with the smartphones. And I mean, we've got some of our best people asking this question, like, why are the kids anxious? Why are people depressed? We've got all these people on...
• 41:01
  on medications for, and you know, it's just like worth asking the question. Like we're busy not having kids because we think it's stressful and hard that maybe we're like avoiding the one thing that would be good for us. Yes, totally. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. I, I, yeah, obviously it is anecdotal, but I completely agree. And I think there's something so deep and hidden about what you're uncovering there. Yeah.
• 41:22
  I think that we're just built. We're built to be in a multi-generational or intergenerational experience. We need old people around us. We need young people around us. We need babies. And we're running this experiment of putting people in same age groups constantly. It's so unnatural. Keeping them away from babies. And then, you know, I think so many women, even that talk about like why there's such a growth and like, we need cats. We need dogs. We need fur babies. It's like.
• 41:47
  Yes, you need something. It's called a child. And if you can't get that, it's wonderful that you get to care for an animal. But let's at least understand where this instinct is coming from and maybe how healing it is to experience what it's like to have an infant.
• 42:00
  Have you seen these places? I mean, there's like places you could go like pet kittens. Yes. You pay money to go in. You pay admission. Pet cafes. I went to one in Seoul, South Korea. It was incredible. There was like the cutest little... And they all cuddling around you. Yeah. Yeah. Here's the place on earth with the lowest fertility. And they are completely filled with these pet cafes because people are willing to spend a lot of money to feel like they're nurturing something. Or if they can't, then at least to get around. But it's like, yes, we...
• 42:27
  There's something we're built for. This is why I think when you mentioned that it surprises people that it's easier sometimes to have five, six, seven, eight kids than to have three or four kids. Some of the reason is what we're describing right now. And that is that these older kids, they really want and they become kids.
• 42:44
  something to these infants like there's a exchange that happens and sometimes that's hard when you've got three kids that are under the age of six for them to have that experience but when you have an eight or nine or ten or twelve year old with a baby in the home right that connection is incredible like what you hear be sure to leave a rating and review for this podcast wherever you use streaming yeah you guys experience that right in your family
• 43:08
  Yeah, for sure. One of our now-grown daughters, I married a widower, and so my husband had six children. We got married. And when we got married, a lot of people said, you know, you should really wait before you have a kid because you've got these grieving children. And that's like the conventional wisdom, like let everybody adjust, let a kid have therapy, you know, do all that. And we just sort of thought, like, I don't know, like, God, you know, we'll see what God has in mind. You know, we'll kind of take it just...
• 43:36
  couple of months at a time and see. Then we were blessed with a child right away. And, you know, I was like, okay, well, all the grownups, you know, I was like 23, all the grownups say this could be bad. So you're sort of like waiting to see. Amazingly, I mean, I would say, and I think my daughter who's now in her 30s with five kids of her own, I mean, she would say too, I think the day that she came to visit me in the hospital with the firstborn was probably the day she first felt like we were a family.
• 44:02
  So you've got this grieving 12-year-old, and it's like she just couldn't believe this baby was for her to take home. And I still get emotional thinking about it. I think that my son was born, in a sense, for her healing. I couldn't have imagined that. I just couldn't have dialed that up. I thought that was just us. I thought we'd had this weird experience. And then I go out and interview people, and I find out what's happening all over the place.
• 44:26
  You use the language of nurturing, so we're made to nurture something or someone. But I also want to just stress that it really is like, so we nurture, but I mean, it's like one of the women in the book, she said, babies provide their own therapy. Yeah.
• 44:41
  And so there's a way in which they nurture us. You know? It's like, that's a funny thing. It's like, well, how's this baby taking care of you? But there is this piece where some of the moms said, no matter how great of a spouse you are, or no matter how great of a parent you are, you're needing things from the people in your life. You need your husband to do things. You need your kids to clean up your room, do your homework. Whereas the baby...
• 45:05
  The baby doesn't need you to do anything. The baby is like, you're just great. The baby just like, there's all this love, but it's just coming out. It's like, they're just pouring it out on you. So, you know, there's this like, we say this all, it's like unconditional love, like who, you know, we, as God has it for us, but we sort of fall short. The babies are pretty close to giving that kind of like love of God, it's like an experience of the love of God. Cause they're so tiny and vulnerable. They don't have big expectations for us. They just love us.
• 45:35
  Yeah. I've heard that experience too with a lot of families we know that have like Down syndrome children. It's almost like there's a permanent, they permanently nurture the family into this loving environment. Like they're like the relationship and the love that they want to express and give is always the most important thing to them. There's never something else. We're always so busy doing whatever. Calculating, slightly criticizing. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. I think that's very true.
• 46:05
  Yeah, God designed a really good thing. And this is, you know, I think part of what, you know, we're both trying to understand and really appreciate that you're spending the time to do the research and write this book, Catherine, because I think that, yeah, we need we need to somehow. I think I think at the end of the day, you're saying, look, God, God designed something really, really good.
• 46:25
  And it seems like culturally we're questioning if the design was good. And what you're writing here is just report after report from women saying, hey, even for us, the people who the culture is saying are the ones being victimized by large families. We are saying, no, this is good. This is a good design. And I think it's a really important project. Yeah.
• 46:48
  Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, yeah, anything else, like where people go if they want to, obviously guys get the book, Hannah's Children, Women Quietly Defying the Birth Deerth, but yeah, anywhere else we could send people. Yeah. Well, I'm kind of, my website is there. It's under construction, but it's my last name, pakaluk.com and books on Amazon. I do really want to encourage people who might feel that, you know, getting through the hardcover experience,
• 47:12
  I mean, I think it reads pretty well, but the Audible is great. I did not read it. It's not me reading it. A lot of my closest friends enjoyed just putting it on the car because the stories, it's pretty easy to listen to. So I encourage the Audible for people who don't want to sit with a long book. Yeah.
• 47:28
  And other than that, yeah, I guess the other thing would just be to pray for me. I am about maybe a couple more months about to embark on the sister project, the brother project of this one, which is to interview dads and kind of figure out like what makes them tick and what are the kinds of...
• 47:44
  Again, like you said at the beginning, what are the kinds of conversions, changes of heart? What are the statements of purpose that I think might be behind? And again, it's a worthwhile research project to undertake these policymakers doing what they're doing. But I actually think fundamentally, it's a really great thing to do in terms of being able to share with young men and women who are deciding when they want to start their families. And you want to just kind of reach in there and say, like, don't wait, don't wait. Yeah.
• 48:11
  That's excellent. I'm so glad you're doing that project. Yeah. If you ever want to come to Cincinnati, I will line up. You'll see the Sprinter van caravan coming of men that I know who have five, six, seven, eight, nine children and that are all going for it. They believe this is a blessing from God and very, very different walks of life, but all have really discovered what you're uncovering in this book and what you'll uncover as you do the research around fatherhood.
• 48:38
  I will put you down on my preparation list as somebody that might be able to help me find subjects. Maybe I'll interview some of your contacts. Yes, I've got a long list. So awesome. Well, Catherine, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. You're so welcome. Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at FamilyTeams.