” If I have a child”? reads the content line of a new email message from Emily Oster, the economist-turned-parent advice guru who rose to fame by advising anxious mothers to be aware that they can prevent freaking out about consuming rice or liquor while pregnant. I opened her email last week and discovered this repulsive user issue of the week:
I’m 35 and so is my father. We love our life, and our dog, and we do no have children. We have many friends without children who seem somewhat content, all things considered. Some of our friends have children, and the majority of them appear to be more frustrated than they were before having children. It is really, truly,  , really , difficult for us to determine if we want to have a child. It seems as though having children is perceived as the meaning of life but taken personally as a burden on living. No one can really tell you if they regret having children, either. I’m not sure what the real knowledge is like for my companions, who seem so distant and crap. I’m concerned about missing the screen that might allow us to have a baby. I’m concerned about having a child and being disappointed. How do people make this choice if they have n’t only always wanted to be kids?
—Mid- 30s with a Dog
While there is much to analyze around, from” a huge burden on life” to her” shrinking window”, it sounds like what” Mid- 30s with a Dog” is actually looking for is a suitable cost- benefit analysis. And if our nation’s plummeting population is any indicator, she’s not only.
It’s against this all too common belief that Harvard Ph. D. –holding analyst Catherine Pakaluk set out read Hannah’s Kids: The People Slowly Defying the Birth Derth. Although much has been said about the declining fertility of our nation and what should we do, Pakaluk took a different approach to examining the baby-bust issue.
Pakaluk traveled across the nation to meeting their actual opposite, college-educated women with five or more children, rather than the type of women who write to Emily Oster about children preventing their pleasure. Many of the women she spoke to were also expecting ( with their sixth, seventh, or eighth child ) or were considering adding more children to their family, not at the expense of their happiness, but for the chance to grow it.
Pakaluk is uniquely positioned to analyze the issue of why in a two-child world, trending to a one-child globe, these women would choose to have such very large families. She is a social scientist with an economics degree and the mother of eight children herself. Pakaluk and her team interviewed women about their motivations, not just their choices or circumstances, and her stories in Hannah’s Children have much more to offer than the aforementioned friends with children who” seem so isolated and blah.”
‘ You Believe It’s Good’
Pakaluk quickly refutes the two most common myths about higher fertility rates: that they are either “uneducated” or “religious.” Both of these hypotheses are based on the false assumption that these women are “victims of patriarchal religious beliefs” or that they are “unable to make up their own minds. Yes, women with big families are usually religious, but not all religious women have lots of kids. In fact, most do n’t. None of Pakaluk’s subjects claimed to have chosen to have children because a religious leader had given them the option or because they were opposed to artificial birth control, though one did. In fact, many of the women interviewed do use IUDs and other contraceptives.
As one of Pakaluk’s interviewees said, there’s a distinction between” saying you ]have kids ] because you’re Catholic, which implies … blind adherence”, and having children because you have “actually considered something … because you believe it’s good”. So, yes, Hannah’s Children is full of biblical exegesis, but it does n’t provide the answer to the questions she set out to ask. She uses economic theories of choice to better understand what kind of calculus these women use when planning their large families. As an economist, she is more focused on using these economic theories of choice. She ditches the lazy answer of,” Oh they’re Catholic”, or” They’re Morman”, and instead considers gains, losses, and the value of adding ( or not adding ) a child.
Whether or not she practices religion,” Mid-30s with a Dog” might object to her proposing to have just one child, not her fifth or sixth. And I would advise that taking a charitable dive into the stories of women with seemingly supernatural strength who take child rearing to the extreme and still remain irrationally happy is only fair if you are the type of woman surrounded by the all-too-present ( and too online ) archetype of the stretched- too- thin and anxious working mom that seems to dominate Instagram Reels and New York Times headlines. No, none of the women in the photos are of the influencer trad-wife variety. As far as I can tell, they continue to have children because they genuinely love them, not because they seek to woo followers or sponsor a company.
A Different Kind of Valuation  ,
Women make decisions about having children based on” cost and benefits,” but not in the financial sense that we typically associate with that term. Women” compare the subjective personal value of having a child with the subjective personal value of what they will miss out on if they have one,” writes she, while also acknowledging that these values wo n’t typically be quantifiable or even comparable across all women.
Of course, you do n’t need to be an economist to make that observation. Any mother, of any number of children, has a crystal clear understanding of these economic theories, namely opportunity cost. As Danielle, one of the book’s interviewees and a former doctor- turned- full- time mother of six, pregnant with her seventh, succinctly put it,” Other things die”. Not only did her career suffer when she made the decision to become a full-time mother, but so did other things like eating at restaurants and visiting museums by herself on the weekends. Even the most basic goods such as sleep, comfort, and income are sacrificed. She valued all of those things, but she did not specify” the items that had the greatest value for her and her family.”
This is the crux of Mid- 30s with a Dog’s struggle, but if the women in Hannah’s Children could speak to the root of her problem, they would not likely say it’s her selfish desires that are fully to blame here. These women frequently provided evidence that their own selfishness occasionally made their decisions. Pakaluk instead discovered that these testimony pointed to a larger societal shift in family planning incentives, and she pours a lot of money into explaining why the government’s cash incentives are unlikely to reduce fertility rates.
Sure, there was a first shift in the value that children once held for families, from a time when you needed to have the most children working on the farm or running the family business. However, there are sinister shifts at play as children’s economic value declines. such as decreased religious affiliation, a rise in careers, less time spent with young children at home, and the emotional rewards that come along with it.
As Kyra, a mother of five, pointed out,” It’s hard to say what’s destroying families. But it’s not women doing more. It’s not women working. It’s not women being empowered. It’s taking all of that and acting like she was n’t doing anything before and just putting so much pressure on a woman and letting go of the important things she was doing.
There is a common thread between Pakaluk’s subjects that is to give their family size to God and his provision, but it also applies to a different scale of values. Not just determining if they valued a career or their “identity” more, as the popular narrative goes, but attaching a different type of worth to a child —” that something was the kind of thing typically worth dying for: love for a beloved, love of God, love of eternal life, and the pursuit of happiness”.
Women will only consider a child’s value as” a massive toll on life” until they understand what kind of value a child holds for themselves and our country as a whole.
