WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Catherine Pakaluk: Hannah's Children

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Catherine Pakaluk joins S.K. Sisk on WRFH to discuss her new book, Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Pakaluk, herself the mother of eight, traveled across the United States and interviewed fifty-five college-educated women who were raising five or more children. Through open-ended questions, she sought to understand who these women are, why and when they chose to have a large family, and what this choice means for them, their families, and the nation.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Sarah Catherine Sisk. Joining me today is Dr. Catherine Pekolic, who has just released her new book called Hannah's Children, the Women Quietly Defying the Birth Earth. Dr. Pekolic received her doctorate in economics from Harvard University and is an associate professor of social research and economic thought in the Bush School of Business at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. She lives in Hyatt'sville, Maryland, with her husband and their eight children. Dr. Bacolic, thank you so much for joining me today. You're welcome. I'm so happy to be here. So would you mind just giving us sort of a brief introduction into your new book and sort of your reasons and motivations for writing it?

Absolutely. Really the context of this question of why the birth rates are going so low and they keep going lower, right? So all around the world, U.S. is, of course, true, but all around the world, the national birth rates are falling very bad. and now at this point it's become quite a subjective alarm. And so already, as an economist, you know, following the demographics and it's something I've been interested in, already I was seeing a lot of people

kind of asking that question, you know, what can we do to help the problem? I mean, how could we change or reverse the birth rate? So in that context, I thought, well, you know, there's two things you can do when you see something that's very troubling. You can look at that falling birth rate and it's all in and try to understand it. Or you could do something different, which is a little bit, creative and you could go look at the places where the birth rate is not falling and kind of try to figure out what's happening. What's different about those places, right? So that was really the insight that got me going on this project,

which was travel around the country and find those pockets and those little places where there are people having birth rates look like they're collapsing, you know, so, you know, above normal family sizes and just find out what motivates them. It's a really simple idea, and I started that project six years of ago, little by little, and I did the interviews in 2019, and the book that's coming out now is the realization of that project. That's amazing. My understanding is I know you talked to quite a few women in this book, and were most of them living in sort of a rural area or metropolitan or a combination of the two?

I know it's interesting in trying to determine all the commonalities between these women and their reasons for having multiple children. Right. So I went to 10 different regions in the country, and they're mostly, I would say, moderately suburban. I did visit a few families that were in more pronounced rural areas outside of major metropolises. So, for instance, one family in a pretty rural part of the Rocky Mountains, but still, you know, within a couple of hours of Denver. And, you know, most of the people in the book, I don't tell you where they exactly lose because, of course, goal is not to reveal people's identities in general. There are a couple people who said they didn't mind being identified. But yeah, so mostly sort of broadly suburban, but I definitely had some

exchange. Okay. Interesting. Do you think that historically, I guess the necessity for children seems to be very practical, especially if you were living in those rural areas or on a farm, having more bodies to help with different things around the house makes sense because you have better chance of survival. So do you think that the shift to live in more metropolitan areas plays a big role in, I guess, for lack of better words, the decrease in the value of having children, or do you think it's something deeper and more cultural and more of a social issue? Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say both. I think that your story about the lower level of just say practical or usefulness of having children to survival, to ordinary life, that plays a

huge role. So what I like to say is that, because really, birth rates have been falling since, you know, we could look back to about 1800 in the United States. We would get a pretty steady declines since 1800. And there's a big piece of that, which is clearly related to the decrease in children's sort of practical value to households. Now, something I like to say is sort of look, it's not as if the only reason to have children is because they're useful, right, to the household. But at the same time, a lot of us do kind of the right thing or the good thing initially because it's useful, right? Like how many of us would get up early and start a job when we're young, you know, just without having some practical necessity of making a living.

But when we grow in maturity, we recognize, oh, there are lots of other reasons to work and that work has value and noble purpose. But most of us, you know, right out of the starting gate, we're not motivated by that. So I do want to say that, the, economic value of children to households played a big role. And I don't think that's altogether bad thing, right? And we could also add, then at the turn of the 1900s, the push to have sort of universal schooling for children, which again takes children out of the sort of livelihood of the household, and then further abolition of the sort of the New Deal programs, but in particular,

Social Security programs or programs like that across the world, which do what? They reduce this other economic value of having children, which is that they'll take care of you when you get older. So again, there's like another blow to the practical value of children, right? You're not looking to have children so that somebody will help you out when you get older. And so with the receding of all those values, that sort of practical value, I guess the way I put it is there's got to be something else that you value in children to kind of keep you going when that value erodes.

And that's what we're seeing today is the pockets of people who are still having children, And in spite of the loss of that practical value are people who see some kind of transcendent value, or they understand or they believe in the eternal worth of having children. So that's where you said is it a cultural thing. And I would say, yeah, we are certainly seeing a decline in religious faith and kind of moving away from the sources of biblical faith that tell us, you know, actually children are blessings, even if they're not practically useful. They're great blessings and they're worth having.

Yeah, so that's a long-winded answer to your question. Oh, absolutely. I feel like there's a common misconception about the kinds of women that choose to devote a good portion of her life to motherhood instead of working what we now think of more of a stereotypical office job. They are sometimes portrayed as passively, you know, maybe submitting to a husband's desire for a lot of kids or even, I think sometimes people try to make the stretch of relating having a larger, family with lower levels of education. And so I was wondering if maybe you could shed some light on this and talk a little bit about what some of the women in your book are like and how they are different from this. Because I know you talked about several of them are highly educated. Yeah. So I want to get out of the starting gate here that I don't, I don't present highly educated women in my book for the purpose of holding that up as some kind of norm or standard or ideal that everybody should

have. But the reason I investigated and wanted to look at the patterns among women with college degrees or even medical degrees, lawyers, professors of different subjects is because kind of what you just outlined, the big crunch that we see around the world with the falling fertility, it really correlates very tightly with women's education. So what I wanted to do was in part of this, I mean, I had a limited research budget, so I couldn't, interview thousands of people, and of course, that would have taken a lot of time. So I really thought, like, let me go after kind of the heart of the tension in the modern world, which is that the more education women get, the fewer children they tend to have.

And that's true within countries and across countries. And so lots of people would say that, you know, more or less that it's a correlation that's really strong. Maybe it's even a causal relationship going back to some of the comments that we've heard from some of the politicians around the world, things like, you know, if we can just get all the women in, you know, higher education, they'll stop having lots of babies. And I say that in part because there's a lot of politicians who are still under the misconception

that there are too many children in some places and there aren't. So we tend to see education as this thing that undoes fertility or reduces fertility, almost like clockwork. So I thought, well, let's go find out if that's going to be true. You know, so that was a big piece of this. So everybody that I interviewed had at least a college education or equivalent of college education. And then, yeah, some of them also had advanced degrees of different types. I had, for instance, a couple of medical doctors that I talked to, one of which interestingly gave up

her medical profession when she started having children, and one of which is still practicing absolutely full-time, and her husband stays home full-time with their children. In addition to having this kind of interesting mix of education in my sample, I also tried to show a variety of engagement with work that women have who prioritize children in the way that I just described, they think of children as a great blessing, as worth having for their own sakes, as worth making sacrifices for, but it didn't imply any one path to giving up work or staying attached to work. That was the task was to see if I could present those different things faithfully. Absolutely. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Sarah Catherine Sisk, and I'm here

today talking with Dr. Catherine Pekolic. I definitely think that is something, I know even in my peer group here at Hillsdale, granted, it's definitely a more traditional school in terms of its values, but I know, I think a lot of the young women here even sort of grapple with that still is its motherhood here especially is highly revered and highly valued, and I think most of the young women here aspire to that, but at the same time having, you know, not because of anything they've done, but we've all been sort of raised in a culture of the, you know, the girl boss and hustle culture and everything. And yeah, and these women are still super intelligent. You know, everybody's intelligent as the male students here. And so I think there still comes a time where learning to maybe not

grapple with a loss of identity, but maybe changing their perception to see their identity as maybe a more expansive thing than previously. And so I don't know if there was anything like that in your conversations with these women that you maybe could. share, I think that'd be very interesting. Yeah, that's such a great way that you put that. That was definitely sort of the heart of this, was trying to find out how people grappled with that sense of identity as mothers, as women, and as individual, individual women who had, you know, such a plethora of interests and talents and loves.

And so, again, there sort of wasn't one way. I heard lots of different types of approaches, and I wrote them. They're all in there. I really tried to present them in people's own words because I think there's something, you know, something that, things that are really sublime, right, that are really, that really capture things that are of the heart, right? They can be conveyed to us better in stories. And so I presented those stories.

So, yeah, that sense of identity and potential loss, some women did present a kind of feeling of loss, right? Is this a loss? Maybe, say, giving up a career or a hobby or something that you would. love. There was one woman who talked about giving up recording music. She was a beautiful singer and a performer. And she had to kind of put that. She put it on the back burner. She said, well, it's on the back burner. But it doesn't mean it will be on the back burner forever. And she said, yeah, there is a sense of loss with that. But then she went on to describe kind of, I think, a word that you just used, something like expanding, right?

That you, you aren't just giving up something. Maybe you're transforming it and that there's a kind of expanding of who you. you are so that you become more, more than you expected to be. Also, moms talked about ways in which they found unexpected ways to bring their own interests, whether they were professional or personal hobbies, whatever, into their maternity. And that that was pretty interesting, too. So, yeah, there wasn't one way, but this is definitely the subject of lots of the conversations we had was, you know, how do you make sense of this in a culture that tends to, to value sort of professional accomplishments and just external, external awards, you know,

more than sort of the inner character that you develop. It's like imagine you run a marathon and you're so proud, but like nobody knows you run a marathon. Right. Yeah. Like, you know, you can't put it on a star and say, like, I ran a marathon. But that's sort of how it feels to just to have one baby. It's, you know, it's like an accomplishment far greater than that.

It takes far more self-sacrifice, far more devotion. right, all those things that we admire in a great athlete. But it's not public in a way that maybe it was in the past, in times past. And I don't know. I mean, I'm a little embezzling about just sort of saying, oh, in the past, we valued motherhood more. I don't know if we did and I don't want to speculate. But I would certainly say today, the sacrifices that expand your personality in relation

to motherhood are not, you can't see them. They're internal. Absolutely. Yeah. I can imagine the difficulty of feeling. like you dedicate essentially the timeline of a career to something, and then it's not that it's all about putting something on a resume, but you've done something so profound and, you know, actually made a mark on the earth after you've left it, and then to not have that, be recognized in the

same way would be challenging. Right. I was going to say, well, we're social animals, right? And that's, that's a good thing. It's truly wonderful that we're social. But part of the social, our social nature really craves affirmation from others. And I wouldn't say that that, that, makes us, you know, bad or a week, right? We really do look for approval from others. And so at a time when it's not so easy to be affirmed for a choice like this, dedicating, say, 10 or 20 years to raising children, it just looks like, wow, I'm just not going to be affirmed in this. I'm going to have to draw my strengths from, say, my husband and my closest family, maybe, if you're lucky, from your face. That's hard. That's a hard road.

Absolutely. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Sarah Catherine Sisk. And I'm here today talking with Dr. Catherine Pekolic. I remember there's one interview I listened to that you had done, but I really liked the way you were describing the idea that you could actually have kids earlier on and then you are still at a, I would say, a relatively young age to then have a fulfilling career after the fact once your kids are sort of old enough that you can step away a little bit more. And I don't know, it seems super profound to me just because we have this society that's sort of oriented around, you know, you go to high school, you go to college, you need to, you know, get a job right away and then you don't want to like step away

because then you might miss out on a promotion or get behind or whatever. And it seemed, I don't know, that just seemed very, that's a lot more intuitive because, you know, in part due to biology, because it's like, I think a lot of young women now feel sort of an internal conflict between maybe what our biology is, is programmed to be wanting to do at a certain age versus what the societal expectation is. And I think the word that you use to describe, those women who are able to have children younger and then continue their career after the fact, I think you described it as humane and I felt like that was really profound to me and I was wondering if maybe you have any sort of any more thoughts about that or any ideas as to if that would be

a practical reality you see maybe our culture taking on at some point. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm always dismal about the thought that we're going to get all of the, right? I don't think it's very hard to get all of society to get on board with anything in particular. It's kind of mysterious, right, how we end up kind of all doing the same type of thing, right? These, what we call them social scripts or something like that. But kind of, as you put it, like, there's a norm in place, and that norm is, you know, school and then high school and then college, right, then job. And that's a great timeline for men who need to prepare themselves for supporting a family. That's what men ought to be doing.

Right, but clearly, you know, and I'm absolutely not the voice against women finishing lots of education. I mean, obviously, not against that. But we have to be playing with ourselves and with other people that the best time to start your family as a woman is going to usually your early 20s. And so, right, so a lot of people don't have a chance to kind of stop and come up for air. They're just constantly going on to the next thing. And listen, it's not that they're not enjoying those things, and I always want to say that. It's great to be in a great college, and it's great to have a good and fulfilling job, especially so many young women are participating in things that are improving the culture and lots of ways.

Those are good things. You should love doing those things. But because there's this timeline, which we really have to say it's a male normed timeline, we're just all in the same male norm. And to be truthful, part of that male norm too is related to peer marriage, right? So the expectation is mostly that you marry someone pretty close to your age. and that also really works against this idea that kind of like there's a best time for a woman to get married and it's probably right around the time she finishes college biologically right that's the best time for her to start with family

lots of the women I talked to were people who are a little bit more like me in the sense that a we're doing now at the time I interviewed on kind of second careers or yeah like I kind of had I extended my graduate school for a lot of years as long as I could before they took me out. And, you know, that's okay, no, no. But I like to say that, well, it didn't feel okay in the time I was in graduate school. It felt like I was kind of a failure. And I'm not saying people look down on me. I don't know what people thought about me, truthfully.

But when we have high standards for ourselves and you sort of recognize, there's a way to do this. Like, you're going to go to a PhD, there's a way to do that. And so you do just kind of have to step out into the unknown and say, well, okay, you know what? I'm not going to do it that way. And that stepping out, at least for me in my life, was an active base, right? It was like, God didn't put these talents in me to leave them wasted, right? And God knows I would like to use them for his kingdom. But I do know that, like, first things first.

And so since God sent me a husband at this point in time, and since we should have a family together, we should try to do that. And then you just kind of take a deep breath and go, like, do I trust you? I do trust you. Like, it'll work out. You know, it'll work out. I don't know how, but it'll work out. So I do.

I do think more people doing that can lead to greater recognition that that's an okay and even a praiseworthy thing to do. So I'm optimistic that the more we all talk about this, the more people will feel courageous enough to do it, and the more it will be easier to do it. It won't be such a crazy. I saw it this day when I was heading into college, the women, a generation above me,

who had really come up in the 1980s, that generation was pretty harsh. I mean, they kind of, those women had this attitude, like, you just have to cut it all off. They know, do all the things and then maybe squeeze your baby in at like age 39. Yeah. It's like such a harsh message, right? Exactly. So, yeah, I'm optimistic.

If we talk more about this, it'll be easier. I'm glad to hear. Just one final question. I would be respectful over time, but obviously traditional religion is usually where we find, I think most of these women who are open to having more kids, How integral do you think those traditional values and traditional religion is in promoting that sort of pro-child culture? Is it something that, you know, helps but isn't necessary? Or is it something that we really can't cultivate that kind of change without?

Yeah, that's a great question. I really like it. Thank you. I'm pretty convicted we can't do without it. I don't think you can find places in the world today where people are prioritizing children who don't have a strong biblical faith. And I think biblical faith has lots of expressions. I interviewed Mormons. I interviewed Presbyterians. I interviewed Baptists. I interviewed Catholics. I interviewed Jewish women. And what they did have in common was this strong biblical faith. And I don't mean to

suggest that everybody in each of those sort of religious communities would have that strong faith. So what we're really looking for is a kind of, what does it mean to sort of really believe, right? And the only way I could describe it, there's no word for it. You know, some people will say like Orthodox or devout, right? What is that word? Right. I didn't want to use the word. So for me, the best way to describe it was this biblical faith, this faith that ultimately God created the world and he understands that and he's providing for us because he gave us our capacity to create life and he told us it was good and he asked us to do it. And then throughout the Holy Scriptures, right, we found this commitment to the idea that children are blessings

and we should pray for blessings, right? And we shouldn't put obstacles in the way of receiving those blessings. Yeah, so my belief after doing this project is that we can't restore a culture of the priority of children without a revival and a deepening of our biblical faith. Absolutely. Thank you so much, and I appreciate you take the time to talk to me today. You're so welcome. Our guest has been Dr. Catherine Pekolic, and I'm Sarah Catherine Sisk on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.