The Daily Signal - Why Have More Kids?

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Why do some women choose to have large families? As the American birth rate declines, academic Catherine Ruth Pakaluk decided to look at the 5% of American women who are outliers, and who have five or more children. With a colleague, she interviewed 55 of those women, and shares their reasons and experiences in her new book, "Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth." These women share openly about how having a large family has affected their careers, their identities, and their marriages. Listen to the full interview on "The Daily Signal Podcast." Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, March 25th. I'm Kate Trinco. Today we have my interview with Catherine Ruth Bacolic, author of the new book, Hannah's Children. Catherine went around the United States and interviewed women with five kids or more and asked them, why? We'll unpack what's going on there and whether it has any answers for the rest of America. Now, stay tuned for my conversation with Catherine Bacolic after this. Virginia Allen here. I want to tell you all about a great way you can stay in the know on all the news the Daily Signal covers. Social media. The Daily Signal has an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We are constantly posting news stories, clips from interviews, videos, and more across all our social platforms. Follow the Daily

Signal on social media so you can get all the latest content from Reels on Instagram to video clips on Facebook and political commentary on Twitter. Joining me today is Catherine Ruth Bacolic, author of the new book, Hannah's Children, The Women Quietly Defined the Birth D.E. Catherine is also an economics professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Catherine, thanks for joining us. You're welcome. I'm delighted to be here. So to do the research for Hannah's children, you and another researcher found 55 women who chose to have five or more kids, and you interviewed them. Now, according to your research, about 5% of American women in their 40s have

five or more children. So this is a fairly small population. What was alike about these women and in what ways did they differ when you spoke to them? Great question. What way they were like? That was actually part of the question heading out. I wasn't sure if they would all be alike in some ways or if they would be very different. One of the things that was after is this question of if we think about who out there defies the trends, right? So we have this backdrop of falling birth rates. You know, there's these people all over the place. And like you said, this is 5%. It's not a terribly huge number. The question is, do they have anything in common that would be useful for us to know about, right? Or are they all kind of idiosyncratic, you know, people who like to wear, you know, pink hair or have preferences

about their clothing that we all wouldn't understand? Or are there things that would be in common? So I truly didn't know the answer to that. And I would say that, you know, I tried to, well, it's 95,000 words, which I shouldn't admit to. You know, so I tried to put that together. But what was in common, I would want to say a certain commitment to the intrinsic value of children. And that for most of the women I talk to, that commitment, that kind of principled conviction that children are worth having, in spite of the fact that children require us to rearrange our lives in certain ways and requires to make sacrifices, they're worth having for their own sake. Not for ourselves to become parents, that's like an element of maybe a kind of like a piece

of a fulfilled adulthood, right? You think I want to check the box, I have my job, my career, my travels, my hobbies, and my parenthood. But that actually, above and beyond checking the box of being a parent, you might do this again, like a second or a third or a fourth time, because the child itself is worth having for her own sake or for his own sake. And that was something that was present in common across all the women I spoke to. And so we can impact that more. What does that look like? Where does it come from? But I would want to zero in on that as the common factor. Yeah. Okay. And so most of these women, when they got married or when they had their first child, were they, you know, imagining, oh, I want a bunch of kids, I want a baseball team,

or did some of them evolve over time? Did they maybe start out wanting just a couple of kids and then it changed? Yeah. I'm so glad you asked that question. You're the first interview to ask that question. And the reason it's such a, you know, it's the reason it's such a great question is because it's pretty much the first question I asked my subjects in our interviews. I said, you know, when you got married, did you know, you wanted to have, you know, five, six, seven children? And the answer was, I would say unanimously no, but let me split that into two parts. I didn't interview anybody, maybe one out of 55. And it was a joke who said, well, when I was a kid, you know, I wanted to grow up and have 12 kids or something like that. But nobody got married with a fixed number of children in mind. There were two types. There were types.

there were types who got married and because of the way they grew up or because of something they had seen in their previous lives and I tried to find out what that was. They knew they would like to have a large family if God would send them children. So there were the types who already, when they were married, they were open to having a family and that had lots of different expressions. And then there were the types they called the converters, the people who said, you know, I went into this wanting one child, maybe two children, but then something changed. And that was a very interesting thing. Something about the experience of having children was very common. And then in some cases, a religious conversion. Okay.

Yeah. So many of the women you interview, they seem to be stay-at-home moms or they maybe work part-time. I know there was one exception where there was a woman whose husband was a stay-at-home dad, but largely it seemed like the women were, I guess, having the career impact. How do these women, many of whom were well-educated feel about, I guess, not necessarily being able to as aggressive pursue their professional aspirations as maybe women with fewer children or women without kids. How do they feel about that? Yeah. I would say there are a bunch of different expressions of that. And what I don't want to do is sit here and gloss over it. Right. So some women prior to being married had developed

pretty strong career aspirations or even in some cases had, you know, there was a junior partner in a law firm who, you know, really wanted to keep doing law. And she thought that was really deeply part of who she was. And so for those women who had developed very strong attachments and, you know, I say loves for their careers, you mentioned the one mom who had a stay-at-home dad, and she was a pediatrician, and she just felt that practicing medicine was a really big part of her her vocation to heal. So for the ones who had those stronger career aspirations, I would say they had all different ways of putting it. Some just said, well, I do love my work, but it's not the most important thing in my life. But it's important enough that I'm doing both things, right? So there's a

professor who said, she loved her work. She taught college. But she said, well, would I be a better scholar if I didn't have all these children? She said, for sure I would. She said, I don't have a published book, for instance. And she said, but, you know, when I think about what matters, people matter to me. And so I have a home rich with persons. That was a very clear articulation of a kind of tradeoff, right? These two things are in conflict, maybe writing more books. And or being a better scholar and being a mom to five. And I'm happy with my choice. She said other women felt that, you know, it was just part of what they sacrificed.

I think Leah said, well, some of these things are on the back burner, but they're not on the back burner forever. You're going to rotate them back later. And finally, I think the former lawyer, I think the way she put it was kind of that in the shift to becoming a mother, there's the possibility. And I don't think it happened to everybody. there's the possibility of actually becoming or finding an affinity with a new identity, right? So she said, well, I felt that I was this lawyer. The lawyer was who I was. But later,

not with the first kid, but with the third or the fourth or the fifth kid, I started to think, no, this mom person is actually who I am. It's not like the real self was back there, the lawyer. And so who is that new self? Well, the new self is this kind of new creation. You don't leave behind the lawyer that you were. but you become this mother person. And for different women that I talked to, that was a harder or an easier shift to make. Yeah, could you speak a little bit more about the identity issue you brought up? Because I see I'm a millennial women I know my age.

I feel like are struggling with this. And like because especially in the early years, being a mom is so all encompassing. I mean, I don't have children, but seeing my friends and family. How do these women, even aside from career, like do they feel they lose their identity to their kids? You mentioned having a new identity. How does that tension sort of sort itself out? Yeah. So I would be irresponsible if I sat here and said there was one way that sorts itself out, right? So clearly some of the women I spoke to didn't experience this tension in a really deep way. But lots of them did. Lots of them did. And so you have expressions of hard. I would definitely want to say that if I'm thinking about all the interviews, people seem to indicate the women I spoke to seem to indicate,

that it takes a while, that it's, that there's something that happens with our first couple of children. I would certainly say this was true for myself, but I don't want to generalize that, that there's a hanging on. Like, it's possible to have a couple kids and kind of like, you know, it's like you put your life on pause. That's my life. You put that on pause and you have a couple. And then you kind of, it's like, oh, few, like I'm done with that, you know, hard thing. I ran the marathon. You know, I kind of do it as a, I don't know, like a, it's like an aberration in your life. You just put on this other thing. I'm going to be a marathon or I'm going to do, but it's brief. But if you do it long enough, that's when this kind of gradual shift takes place. And it seems to be

that for the women I talk to, you know, somewhere between three and four, you know, maybe for some closer to five. And it's not that, you know, I tried to struggle with, I tried to express in the book the way that women struggle with this. It's not something that's easy or gets resolved easily. But it's definitely not a kind of picture of the old self is lost. I mean, so I want to stress that was pretty resounding. Women talked about this shift to becoming a new person in lots of different ways. There's a lot of emphasis on becoming a bigger person or like your character expanding, your heart expanding, your interests expanding. Yeah. So kind of this tension between like personal growth and the difficulties that, right, anything that involves personal growth requires

difficulty at the beginning or even quite for a long time. I mean, I just think about Malcolm Gladwell's, you know, 10,000 hours hypothesis, right? That, you know, you have to do something for 10,000 hours and then you've become really good at it. And I think that's a theme here, right, is that very few of the women in our culture apply that same logic to motherhood. We don't think of motherhood as a skill. or as something that you can become deeply. We think of it as a binary that you enter into. Now I'm a mom, right? Now I'm a mom.

But in fact, what most of the narratives gave me a window into looking at was the idea that it's much more accurate to think of mothering as something that it's sure, it's a state. Yes, you're a mother or you're not a mother. But that also in that state, it's a kind, there's a kind of, we could say it's a kind of habit or there's a possibility of seeing the act of mothering as a habit. in the way that we think of other habits where you could get better at it or skill. So there's a skill of caring for others, nurturing them. And, you know, man, you're a better mom with your fifth than you are with your first. That's why I think this is why oldest children are so messed up. I mean, I'm an oldest.

So I can't say this. Like, we're just so demanding and we're so confused. But, but yeah, the sort of transition to like, I don't know, it's like, think of those studies of human excellence. So that's, I think, part of this shift. It's not merely that something is lost. It gets transformed. It gets reborn.

But at the same time, it's not just about the old self getting transformed. It's about becoming this person who's expert in something. And what are you expert in? You're expert in sort of nurturing, nurturing small human beings and bringing them to their maturity. That's pretty neat. Like, that's pretty neat. And we tend not to think about that as being a skill, right?

And I don't want to take us too far off track. but I've just been reading all of these news stories about the kind of these state-sponsored daycare situations, like the one in Canada that we've been looking at. And this general thought that like the care of children is just something that you can put them in care. There's a, we don't talk a lot about the quality of care precisely because we don't think about it this way. We think of children need to be watched by someone. We don't think about the skill that's involved anyway. So I don't want to get off into that track.

But I would just want to, this is something that. really emerged, that you can become really good at this. This is like a thing you could get good at. And in a world where the typical family has just one child, we have a world of pretty inexperienced mothers. That's an interesting point. Yeah. So another thing that I hear a lot from people is they're worried about the expense of raising a kid. And I feel like we keep hearing on the news, these statistics. And I was Googling it this morning. And I found, you know, a Washington Post article that said, according to the Brookings Institute citing the Agriculture Department that the average cost to raise a kid, not including college, was going to be $310,000. Oh, wow. And you know, you're speaking to these women who have

five or more children. Are they wealthy? Are they living a very poor life? How are they managing financially to have this many children? Yeah, all types. I mean, certainly a lot of them volunteered up front that, you know, they shop at thrift stores. They only drive secondhand cars, that they do lots of things that are kind of thrifty. In fact, I talk one chapter about one of the, one of the wealthiest moms I talk to, who's in one of the superzips in the country. And she talks about how they, for, you know, little vacations, they'll go to a local, you know, one of these local, like, medium level hotels. They take all the kids and they just take their kids swimming in the pool, right? So they, like, they sleep overnight. They get takeout pizza. Anyway, it's, but it was a neat expression of thriftiness.

So I would certainly say that there was a common discussion about thriftiness and about, I think Leah said something like, look, you know, people don't realize you don't buy all the stuff for every kid. You know, hopefully you get gifted or your help to get those first things, the strollers, the car seats, all those things, but you can reuse them. So that's just on the point of the cost themselves. So certainly just thinking about the sample at large, they were not all wealthy. I interviewed people at every level of the income distribution. from the very wealthy to the middle class to women who had been on and off support or assistance of some kind. So certainly they weren't people who were, yeah, for whom childbearing was especially like easy or coughless, but they did practice thrift. Okay. How does having a lot of children

affect the marriages for these women? Do they have stronger marriages? Do they have weaker marriages? Again, sort of going to the financial side. I can see people being like, well, do you ever at date night when you have that many kids or can you even afford to? How did it impact their marriages? Yeah. Well, I think along the lines of the Googling the cost of having a child, right? There's like fundamental idea that it's going to cost $300,000 for a child. And we kind of, we see those headlines. We know they're probably ridiculous. I mean, right? Like I'd be super in the red if that were true. I don't think it's probably true. But yeah, so let me answer your question about the marriages. Along those same lines, you can sort of find on Vox and all these places.

You can find these ridiculous stories about how basically having kids will ruin your marriage. And listen, I actually want to point out that I don't think that thought that children are a threat to your marriage is so completely insane. Or it's so far even from like certain religious traditions. I know that the well-read mom book club is reading a severe mercy right now, which is a, you know, a really fascinating story about the main characters meet and fall in college and then want to sort of hang on to the beauty of their youthful love. One of the things they discern as young couple, young married couple, is like if we have children, that is going to definitely take away from our marriage. And so that that's sort of the paramount thing. So I just want to point out, like, it's, I don't think it's a completely insane idea to think

that maybe like bringing somebody else into your marriage, which is so important, is a threat. And that's why I asked my subjects about that. You know, and so, of course, I can't generalize. I mean, there's all kinds of cases. I come from a large family, and it's a broken marriage. There's all kinds of cases. But in a sense, there's a kind of, I want to say that the stories bring like a structure of plausibility.

If it's possible that there's one marriage with, you know, nine children in it and they're still in love, I mean, then it's possible for that to be part of human experience. And so we, I would say we got the spectrum. Everybody, I mean, I didn't interview anybody whose marriage was kind of like currently on the rocks. But we did find the spectrum from the couples who said we are still starry-eyed and we look at each other in the same way as when we first got married. to the women who really talked about marriage being super hard and something that.

And so in those cases, I would say that one of the things that came out in relation to children in marriage was this really interesting idea that I think Danielle says this. She says, well, it's a blessing to have children as part of your marriage because it kind of puts you in a place where you're on a mission together. Right. So for the times when, you know, romantically, you're not maybe staring at to each other's eyes as much as you used to be or your, you know, people talk about marriage sometimes as a roller coaster, you're up and down and there's ups and there's downs. But in the down moments, if the children are your purpose or your mission, well, you've got something holding you together even in the down moments. So yeah, I would say a bunch of women, you know, they just really were, they talked about, you know, how great things were pretty consistently. And others, you know, you could hear it in the conversation. they struggled more, but their children were constantly a source of, I guess, like, bringing the couple back together. So I think, again, not to sugarcoat anything. These aren't

all storybook marriages, but marriages that are hanging in there, you know, and they'll say things like I see us together going forward through thick and thin, that kind of thing. So how does it affect the children to have lots of siblings and like you, I'm the oldest, although a five? So, I mean, I know my own experience. but I'd be curious when you were interviewing these women. Again, I think we see a lot of sort of negative media things like, oh, they won't get enough attention from their parents, there won't be enough resources, etc. How was it for the actual children?

Yeah. Now, of course, I'm talking to the moms. I didn't interview the kids. Right. And the kids are mostly quite young. But this was really interesting. And I think we're having a conversation now in this country about why the kids aren't growing up. I mean, you know, hats off to Abigail Shire's work, which I think is so, so interesting.

But this was something that came out of my study that I did not expect. That's something I was looking for. I was really interested in these questions about how people decide and self-identity and those sorts of trade-offs. But it was like you couldn't talk to women for more than a few minutes about their families before these stories came out. Stories of what do you love most about this lifestyle? What are the things you want to get on the record?

These sorts of things. And you'd hear these things, well, what really swells me with pride is when I'm at the playground. and my 11-year-old son climbs to the top of a wall and looks for all of his younger siblings to make sure they're all being. And that just kind of these sorts of stories would come out spontaneously in the interviews and I felt was really important to include them. So the thought was sort of that, yeah, if you have five kids like in your family or six or seven,

there are aspects of stepping up, like the older kids step up and, you know, outside of, you know, idiosyncratic situations, that stepping up is a source of joy and a source of pride and something that naturally causes oldest children or older children to mature in ways that I think it's tough to do just by sort of saying you have to buck up and mature. There's somebody that's younger than you are that's meatier than you are. So I heard a lot of these kinds of stories and I thought, well, this is a really interesting, this is something we have, you know, all of these college students soup, you know, they can't wash their laundry. They can't, you know, they don't know, like, how to cook a meal. There's all these things. Well, I think the way one mom put it was something like,

at a certain point, you know, you can't do it for everybody. And that feels, that feels really overwhelming when you've got two or three kids and the fourth one comes along and you think, well, I can't make everybody's ramen. I can't make everybody's. But then all of a sudden, your nine-year-old's going, I can boil that water and you're thinking, oh, my gosh, they're going to kill themselves. But in a sense, out of desperate, you go with that or you let them do it. But that's like they grow up. And I would say there are sort of two pieces that I heard and I'll just stop there. Two pieces that I heard about that seemed worth discussing. I can't verify all of this. These are just ideas that we'll hopefully have a conversation about.

One was just the maturity that it allows older children and the family to become mature in ways that clearly our culture is having trouble producing. Like these kids who fail to launch and all. these different ways. That was the one thing. And the other piece that lots of moms talked about was the way in which that being needed for the kids that are older, the 10-year-olds, the 12-year-olds, the 14-year-olds, that being needed by younger siblings was a source not just of joy, but a really deep happiness. And so that's the other part of this conversation, right? It's like, we're raising these teenagers who, like, don't know who they are and they feel useless and they, struggle with depression, anxiety, and they're on their phones a lot. They're just isolated.

And so here's this whole other testimony that says, well, maybe if you're 12 years old and you are like the favorite big sister of this three-year-old who follows you around everywhere and basically thinks you walk on water, how does that change the experience of the awkwardness of their teenagers and how does it change your sense of who you are, your identity, and certainly how does it prep you for thinking about whether children are worth having when you enter your 20s and your 30s. So those were all, I would say just discoveries or startling things to me that I wasn't out hunting for, but I felt that I had to include in the book because they were so interesting. Yeah, I thought that was one of the most interesting parts in Hannah's children actually when you discussed mental health and large

families. And, you know, you just mentioned Abigail Schreier, who's new book, Bad Therapy is, you know, basically documenting how mental health is really bad for America's kids right now. So could you, I know you unpack it a little bit just now, but could you unpack a little bit more how, how you see possibly, you know, a large family affecting mental health in a positive way? Yeah. So I want to say that, you know, this definitely came as a surprise. It's not something I'm not a, I'm certainly not a qualified professional. And I don't have, you know, reams of research on this. But it was certainly something so resounding that I included. I sort of built a whole chapter around it at the very end of the book because I do hope it's

something we can pick up. It turns out that there's very little research on this. I did a quick search, just kind of question, for instance, like what is the protective effect against not becoming depressed, not becoming anxious, not having, you know, various manifestations of psychological distress in your teenage years? What's the protective effect of being around an infant or a baby? And I think we've been for a long time so primed. you know, probably most of it's an anti-child culture. We've been so primed to think of babies as a burden that it's like not even a question we ask, like that having a baby could be, in fact, like a lifeline for somebody. And of course, we're afraid of the possibility that people out there might have babies

on purpose to be a lifeline. And, you know, of course, we don't want to normalize that. So it's like just not in our language, right? Like, well, oh, obviously if you're 12 years old and your mom brings home a baby from the hospital. It's a new baby in your family. Like, obviously, you're going to be one of the happiest kids in the country, right? Like, that's not anywhere. We don't have data to support that. So, yeah, so you asked about let me just briefly summarize what's in that chapter. Basically, I heard early on in the study from a mom who talked about bringing, I don't know, like her, like, ninth or tenth baby home and that she had a teenager at home who was, she thought, you know, kind of on the border of being clinically anxious and depressed. And,

And she said that she's the language that when this was a boy, this 12-year-old boy held her newborn, that it was like a sunlamp, that being it withholding the baby was like a sunlamp, and it just melted away his issues. And at the first time I heard this in the study, I thought, well, this is probably, you know, that was a nice story. It just kind of went into the transcript. And then I heard it again from a woman who talked about her husband had lost his job and and lost his dad, like back to back.

And he wasn't sure he was happy about her pregnancy. So it's kind of a confluence of bad things. And she says, well, when I had that baby, I put her in his arms. She says, and he just didn't put her down. He would go down and hold her on the sofa. And she said something like he just, he held that baby and he healed. And after that experience, he said to her, we can have as many more babies as you want to have because the baby is not the problem. The baby is the solution.

And so I heard it there. And then I heard it again. And I heard another story, completely other side of the country. And it was a case of a much more severe, a child who was much more severely depressed and in therapy. In fact, at the time of medications and therapy. And they had a kind of an unexpected pregnancy in that family. The mom was struggling with why God would send her a baby when she was struggling with this older child. But the baby was the cure.

The baby was what the child. And so I just at that point, I said, all right, that's enough. Like this is a theme. This is like not just a one-off. And I think I counted up about 20% of my stories had some piece like that. And I just thought, where's the teams of researchers researching this? And if it's not being done, I mean, this is the point of doing qualitative work, right? Is that sometimes we don't know the questions we should be asking.

So this is what it brings to the table is like, huh, like, hey, wait a second. So I say at the end of that chapter something like, you know, in this, where we have all these diets and all these therapeutics and therapists. therapies and medications, but there was a subset of my subjects who thought, well, maybe we should try having more babies. Maybe more babies is the answer to our overly medicated culture. And I thought that's a really provocative and interesting thought. So I just hope it opens up a conversation there. Of course, I don't have the end of the story on it. So on the right right now, as well as I guess across the country, there's a political debate going on to switch gears a little bit about, okay, we have a very bad fertility rate, I think, 1.7 kids per women. How do we fix it? Is government

involved in that? Our public policy is part of that. And I know that's not the main focus of your book, but did your research give you any thoughts about that? Yeah. That's an important question. Yes. So you're right. It's not the main focus of my work, but in a sense, it's the motivating backdrop. Yes. Okay. So I want to differentiate between two types of things. Right. So what I think is true is that I think policies and structures that can certainly make it harder to do things that we want to do. And so I guess I would put it like, it's possible to put obstacles in people's way, make it harder for us to do certain things. So I think there are some pieces of this conversation about what policy can do, like, you know, for instance, deregulating some of the construction of housing

in places where housing is very expensive, those sorts of things. I certainly don't mean when I say that I don't think government policy is the answer. I don't mean to dismiss those good things. We should remove obstacles. But the major kind of thrust of this story is that the people who are defying that 1.7, people who are not like really having families below their interest, that it's really a question of demand. And I guess that's a terrible econ word, right, to say demand, right? It's a question of what do you want and how much do you want it. So I like to use the example of something like running a marathon, I think I said it earlier. If you looked around and you thought we don't have enough people running marathons, you know, one thing you could do is you could think like,

well, maybe people should have more running shoes. Maybe they're all like to just don't have the right resource, right? And so you could helicopter drop a whole bunch of, you know, running shoes into your neighborhood. And, you know, would you get any more marathon runners out of that? The answer is like maybe one, like maybe there's one guy out there who wanted to run a marathon and was like resource constrained. So that's, this policy question really cuts into this question of like, do people want to do this anyway and their policy constraint or their resource constraint, right? There's things they need to have to run the marathon. Or is it question of like, you just don't have that many people who want to run a marathon because like I don't. I mean, it's really hard.

It's like it sounds punishing in lots of ways. It sounds boring. And so if the problem is you don't have enough people who want to run a marathon, then you have to ask the question, how do people develop the desire to run a marathon? And so that's kind of what I'm focusing it on. And it's actually what I think is really the truth about the situation. It does not stand to reason that in the most wealthy society across the globe, in the history of mankind, that as a general principle, we are resource constrained against having children. What makes a lot more sense is that as we've gotten wealthier, different sorts of things. We basically don't want children as much as we used to.

So the question is, where does the desire to have children come from? And so I basically say, look, what policy can do, if it can do anything, is think hard about the value-creating institutions. What are the institutions that help shape people's desires? And I think we'd have to think about schooling, to think about the way we treat our churches, especially our biblical churches, who really do teach these biblical principles about the inherent value of children as a blessing. And when I look around, I think to myself, well, we're super wealthy in our culture, but we certainly aren't treating our churches very well.

We've boxed our churches into a couple of hours on Sunday, maybe not even 45 minutes of coffee and donut. But it's tremendously difficult for churches to build schools. You have a government monopoly that makes sort of asks them to pay twice. I mean, think about all those different things. So that's what my research would point to is, again, not that there aren't some obstacles we could try to remove out there, but I don't think removing those obstacles is going to get us from 1.7 to 2.5. I think to get there, you have to really think about value creation, like how we shape value. So lastly, you mentioned you're from a big family, you have a big family as a mom. What would you say to young women or young men today who are terrified by the

idea of having a large family, maybe even having a couple of kids? What would be your message to them? My message would just be to start with one. Yeah, I mean, I started with one in the sense like I didn't go into marriage thinking I wanted to have eight. And a lot of my students say, well, like, when did you decide to have eight? I never decided to have eight. I just decided to have one. You know, he got married and decided to have one. And the experience of one was so great that we were like, well, we got a pretty good.

We got lucky. Maybe this first baby was amazing. We should just let's have one more, you know. And so just one more, one at a time. And I mean that entirely sincerely, not every. everybody has a great experience. It's certainly true and something I want to acknowledge that people have physical and, you know, emotional burdens that are not the same ones that I had. And for those people, one might be like the most amazing accomplishment in their lives. And I

wouldn't take anything away from that. But I think that if you wait too long to have your first, right, that's the thing we're looking at today is a lot of people have their first at 31 and go, man, I do feel a little jipped. Like, I do, this is pretty great. But, you know, in your 30s, your fertility isn't what it was in your 20s. So there's something about just try that first one. And then lots of people will. But as lots of my colleagues and co-researchers in this area of fertility point out,

to recover the birth rate from 1.7 to say 2.5 or 3, which is probably the social sweet spot. We don't need everybody to have eight. Actually, we just need a few more people to be open to having two or three. And I actually think that there are enough people by nature who will enjoy motherhood a lot more than they expect to enjoy it. Just one. Just have one. All right. Thank you.

Again, this is Catherine Ruth Bacolic. She's got a new book out, Hannah's Children, The Women Quietly Defined the Births Earth. Thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. In the meantime, if you haven't gotten a chance, please be sure to check out our evening show right here in this podcast feed. where we bring you the top news of the day.

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