European President Emmanuel Macron made the questionable observation that people with education don’t want to have several children. ” I often say:’ Present me the lady who decided, being properly educated, to include seven, eight, or nine kids,'” he said.
Catherine Pakaluk, a Harvard Ph. A Catholic University professor, who holds a doctorate, soon shared a photo of herself with her six children and launched the tag #postcardsformacron, urging educated women with large families to email Macron to let him know how bad he was.
However, the subject of big people is a professional, as well as personal, issue for Pakaluk. Through long, interpersonal interviews with 55 women who have five or more children, Pakaluk and her partner Emily Reynolds have then conducted a truly experienced research over the course of many years and across ten British regions. The benefits are chronicled in their new book, Hannah’s Kids: The People Slowly Defying the Birth Dearth.
While there is much to be said about the specific causes of people choosing to grow big people, Pakaluk writes that there is one striking trait that these people share:
I believe it boils down to some sort of deeply held belief, perhaps a judgment from infancy, that the ability to comprehend children, to welcome them into my arms, to take them home, to dwell with them in passion, to surrender for them as they grow, and to delight in them as the Lord delights in us, that that the ability to call it mother, to call it pregnancy, that that item is the most important thing in the world — the most perfect thing I am capable of doing.
Hannah
Pakaluk begins with the tale of Hannah, a woman from a Reformed Jewish background who, through child-bearing, eventually found herself procreating and growing her family, which she affectionately called” this key to infinity.” At the time of her interview, Hannah had seven children, and described her choice to have a large family 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”.
Pakaluk refers to this Hannah throughout the book, connecting her to the biblical Hannah of the Christian Old Testament, who endured infertility before returning her first child to the Lord.
The majority of the study’s subjects shared a similar expression of procreation as eternal and transformative, including the identities of the mother, the family’s society, and the potential extension of the family’s intrinsic values of faith and forbearance to those raised in large families, which will have an impact on the world in the future.
Although some women in the study had doctorates and worked in academia, their family dynamics frequently matched those with lower income and education. Pakaluk discovered that habits across socioeconomic divisions grew along with the family size. These families often grew around similar core values, hardships, and joys.
Expressive individualism
Through a protracted discussion of the economics of family over time, Pakaluk contextualizes the purpose and potential of the study in Hannah’s Children. She records historical patterns of American marriage, from the “rugged individualism” that predated early American families to the “expressive individualism” of the 20th century that” the self in contradistinction from the family”
Despite their diverse backgrounds and means, the ability to have a “dignified” life and a “dignified” life are common themes in the stories Pakaluk and her colleague share because their study subjects “believe they have found” themselves in having children rather than lost them.
” As it happens, in a two-child world trending to a one-child world, the desire for children and how it is charted in relation to competing human goods isn’t a small thing…” Pakaluk found. Nothing more profoundly influences the way we organize our lives together than the first society we experience, the family, and there is no more economically significant question than where people come from.”
According to the book, the contemporary challenge of traditional and cohesive family roles has had and will likely continue to have an impact on family growth patterns. And the declining population will impact future workforces, infrastructure, and entitlement programs far beyond basic demography.
” The political and economic consequences of these trends cannot be overstated”, Pakaluk writes. ” Birth rates are falling because of tradeoffs that women and households are making between their children and other things that they value,” the statement goes.
Of interest, Pakaluk notes, is the so-called “paradox of declining female happiness” evidently declining for the past five decades according to labor economists, as women continue to choose careers and limited children over large families.
Pakaluk examines the pro-natalist policies in place around the world, pointing out that they unmistakably fail to lead to long-term change.
” Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives”, Pakaluk writes. ” People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children … Religion is the best family policy”.
Through her interviews, Pakaluk dispels the myth that large-families are unaware of and haven’t considered the costs, and that having many children is not a choice made by a person. The costs, both personal and literal, have absolutely been calculated by these women, Pakaluk found. Her subjects were aware of the identity change they would experience in contrast to the lack of “fitting in” to contemporary American culture, the alternative lifestyle they would lead, and the birth dearth.
However, every woman who was interviewed said that the greater good, the overall benefit of having so many children, far outweigh any loss or unused opportunities. One mother specifically expanded her family to please a beloved spouse, while the majority of women believed they were giving birth to the greater gift.
Their Contribution
Pakaluk concludes that policymakers and economists would do well to recognize the sampling she surveyed, a” small but not insignificant demographic group”, she writes, “women … who see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing. Women like them may never be a majority, but their stories have profound relevance for the domestic policy questions related to demographics, as well as for the deeper public dialogue about lifestyle patterns, individualism, rootedness and connectedness … and the future of the American experiment”.
Pakaluk’s deep personal devotion to the large family and his rigorous academic approach may sway people’s opinions about the cost savings of American families with five or more children, giving rise to more interest and societal support for what is now viewed as the outlier.
Ultimately, her” Hannahs” reiterate the ultimate and archetypal meaning of the family unit, reinventing cohesive community within the home against the tide of population depletion.
Ashley Bateman blogs for Ascension Press and writes for The Heartland Institute about policy. Her work has been featured in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, The New York Post, The American Thinker and numerous other publications. She previously held positions as editor, writer, and photographer for The Warner Weekly, a publication for the German-speaking American military community in Bamberg. She previously held positions as adjunct scholars for The Lexington Institute. Ashley serves on the board of a Virginia-based Catholic homeschool cooperative. Along with her brilliant engineer/scientist husband, she homeschools her four amazing children.
