On Hannah’s Children, an Interview with Catherine Pakaluk
“We’re in fact witnessing the only historically, on record collapse of birth rates that’s not related to disease or famine or something adverse. It’s a perverse collapse. It’s a collapse that’s occurred precisely in a time of rising wealth and prosperity. That’s really the thing that has to be untangled. It certainly looks as if the more wealthy and prosperous people get, the fewer children they have. What’s going on? Against this backdrop of falling birth rates, I wanted to find out who still wanted children and why.”
Maternal Kiss by Mary Cassatt, 1896. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Catherine is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America. She earned her PhD from Harvard with her dissertation “Essays in Applied Microeconomics” and won the Acton Institute’s Novak Award in 2015 for her work on the relationship between religion and economic liberty. Her book, Hannah’s Children, was published on March 19, 2024 and has become a raging success. Judd had come across the book, loved it, and wanted to discuss many of the topics it raised. This is their conversation, edited for clarity and length. The conversation starts after Judd mentioned automatic transcription methods.
Catherine Pakaluk: This is really quite interesting. What we did to get our transcriptions—these were like two-to-three-hour interviews, thirty- to fifty-page single-spaced interviews—we paid undergraduates to listen and transcribe them.
But this was very important. What ended up happening is all these young men and women, listening and transcribing, were reporting back that their hopes and plans had changed because of these interviews. A couple of them have gotten married and had children already. So even at the very beginning, I was persuaded that this material is really valuable. I thought, “Okay, what else could I do to get a bunch of college students to sit around and listen to women talking about their children?”
Judd Baroff: I just absolutely love that. Especially because of how powerful this book was for me, and for the reason you just described. I was raised in a very progressive town outside of New York City, and the subjects in your interviews talk about life with children, and I’m just reading it going, “I’ve always felt like this. And no one around me seemed to.”
CP: It’s so right. You just need to get this in front of people. Everyone won’t change, but it just speaks for itself. You hardly have to say anything else. And most young people, most middle-aged people, they’ve never seen it. Some people say it’s like getting a peek into a totally alien universe. I am so excited to do more. Which is, God willing, coming up.
JB: I look forward to it. But I feel we’ve already started the interview, so let’s start at the beginning. If you had to introduce someone who had never read your book to what it was about, what would you tell them?
CP: So what I sometimes say is my book is about why people would want children in a world where children are not wanted very often. And so I said this a little bit in the book, although perhaps not as much as I should have, but it’s really a book about the reasons why people would find children desirable. Why would they want to have them?
And when I put it that way, it immediately raises the question, “Why do you say that children aren’t wanted?” To answer that, you could do a really funny mix-up of all of the comedians on how undesirable children are. And every couple of months we’re treated to another round of the DINKs [Dual-Income, No Kids] making the case about how their Saturday mornings are dedicated to cooking new recipes, or going to champagne brunches without children. So the book is about the reasons why people might find children really want-able. We’re in fact witnessing the only historically, on record collapse of birth rates that’s not related to disease or famine or something adverse.
It’s a perverse collapse. It’s a collapse that’s occurred precisely in a time of rising wealth and prosperity. That’s really the thing that has to be untangled. It certainly looks as if the more wealthy and prosperous people get, the fewer children they have. What’s going on? Against this backdrop of falling birth rates, I wanted to find out who still wanted children and why.
JB: This goes to an educational aspect of the book; a lesson on opportunity costs. I’m quoting from your interviewee, pseudo-named Angela, whom I have a particular attachment to. So she says, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs,” which is an economics line, I think straight from Thomas Sowell.
CP: Yes, I think that might be right.
JB: And so then you write, “So falling birth rates are a cost problem, but not simply in the way that we usually think about costs—as money affordability.” And that’s what you’re saying is happening; exactly as we are becoming wealthier, birth rates plummet. If we look across the world, it seems to be happening everywhere.
And so you continue, “The opportunity cost of having a child increased sharply with women’s expended education and professional work.” And then later you say, “Those who are immune from falling birth rates are immune because of a difference in demand.” And so I was hoping you would explain that.
“It’s a real mistake to think that women weren’t always working in some way, partnering up to run family businesses or home enterprises.“
CP: If you just ask this to someone at the grocery store or on the street, the response you get, and I get this a lot, is, “Well, aren’t people having fewer kids because it’s so expensive to have children?” I went into this project knowing that I didn’t buy that explanation. If you’re seeing that as people become richer, they choose less of a certain thing, then it would be very strange to say that that thing isn’t chosen because they don’t have the means to do it. So you’d have to qualify that some way.
On the surface level, kids are not getting more expensive. What are the costs of children? For most people, able to conceive their children naturally, conceiving isn’t expensive, right? It’s about the same as it’s ever been, and then it's feeding them and sheltering them. But, without minimizing the hardships that any one family has, generally, food is cheaper. It’s easier to feed, clothe, shelter yourself.
So the things that it costs to raise a child aren’t more expensive. Then you could say, “So children are not more expensive per se, but maybe what's happened is that, as we get wealthier, we want, like, more stylish children.” We want them to go to Exeter and Princeton, and that costs a lot of money.
But even there, you have to make wild assumptions. We can all think of somebody who wants their kid to go to a $50,000 per year grade-school, but most people don’t. Most people are pretty happy to use public schools. That’s pretty constant over time, roughly 90 percent of American kids are in public schools. So, you could argue about college a little bit, but you’d need wild assumptions about how stylish people want their children to be to get the level of decline in births we see.
It forces you to say, “Well, what else is going on there?” This is where I’m building the story from. The really big cost-change to the supply of children arrived in the 1960s, and that was that hormonal birth control that allowed women to plan more carefully their career and educational pathway. The pill is so much better than condoms and other things that came before that now women think, “Okay, I could reliably plan a four- or eight-year course of study without sacrificing marriage or partnership.” And that’s exactly what happened.
We see this radical shift into college and then post-college study in the 1960s through the ‘90s. And at the same time, between 1960 and 1970, we see decline in the number of children that women say would be ideal to have. Do I think women all of a sudden thought kids were less desirable? No, I don’t think so. What we saw, I think, is that when women had another option on the table, they decided that a smaller family size was kind of a better fit for them.
I think that stands to reason, right? It’s like the Apple Watch. I don’t think anyone ceased to value analog watches. They probably have about as much value as before, but you had something else come onto the market that does all kinds of things. [At this point, first Catherine and then Judd show each other their Apple Watches.] And yours has got a nice band. It does all kinds of things the old watches didn’t do. So you go, “Well, are Rolexes not nice anymore? But no, this thing does things the other thing didn’t.”
There is another set of options that women can choose, and so now if a woman wants to choose two or three kids, she’s trading that off against time spent in a fulfilling profession, or even just earning money if the job is not that fulfilling. The only thing about children that’s become really more expensive is what you have to give up in terms of a woman’s time or her talents or her interests. This is why I went after people with college degrees; it’s not because I think that’s the only good way to live.
JB: I had a question about that.
CP: I’m definitely not my making a normative claim about college. I chose college-educated women because I wanted to look at the trade-off for people who could do other things in the labor force precisely because that’s where we see the pinch. And so what I found was these are not people who said to me, “I dislike work. I think working is a bad thing, career fulfillment is evil, not biblical.” Think of any version of Tradism; I wasn’t getting that. What I was getting was, “I think children are really important.” They’re so important that this other thing that I love, say Leah who really loves her music career, is going to go “on the back burner” for a little while. It’s not, “My opportunity cost here is really low, I can’t imagine anything else I would like to do.”
And that would be fine, Judd, like, I would have no complaint if I interviewed a whole bunch of people who said, “This is what I love most, and I really don’t have anything else I’d like to do.” But what I got was a story of a lot of women who said, ‘I’ve got all kinds of millions of other things I’d love to do, but I really like kids.” All right! So, in economic language, that’s saying, “While my cost structure doesn’t look very different from other people, I just have a much bigger demand for children.” It’s a difference of demand.
In economic language, demand is really just an assessment of the extent to which you feel that children satisfy a need for you. I would say for most people that that level is pretty low, at least based on the evidence. Because, again, people are wealthy enough to have kids, and no one’s bossing us around, making us have kids or not have kids. When you see what people choose, you go, well, there’s only two ways to look at that choice. It’s either something people want or it’s an expression of malevolent forces that are keeping people from what they want. It’s a kind of nonsense position to say that falling birth rates are the result of some combination of malevolent forces. We really have to contend with the thought that it reflects that children are not highly demanded.
JB: I was wondering if your choice of the more credentialed women was not, in part at least, to dispel some of the myths around large families. So, for example, I’ve been talking to my friends about your book, and one of my friends said, “Well, is it just because they don’t believe in birth control?” That was just her assumption.
CP: Yep. That’s the number one assumption.
JB: Whereas not only do you talk about how many of these women use birth control—I should say, artificial birth control—but that they also are not ignorant about the facts of life, as it were. There are so many doctors in your stories! So you chose them because of the opportunity cost problem, but did you chose them also to dispel these myths?
CP: Yeah. It is useful for dispelling those myths. And I think actually it’s two ways of describing the same purpose. When I say that I’ve chosen a group that helps to illustrate the opportunity cost phenomenon, that’s really just another way of saying it goes up against the myth that women have nothing else to do. So for sure, obviously, it taps into some of that energy from Postcards for Macron. The number one thing I get from people who are completely unfamiliar with the population of people having children is, “Do they not believe in birth control?”
And so that was a real task to try to describe how this group relates to birth control. I didn’t know where I was going to go with that, to be honest. And so, as you know, I dedicated like a whole section to that point [the end of chapter 12]. I wanted to be very explicit. I don’t think this is a story about rejecting birth control. And I think that really opened my eyes to sort of the nature of the phenomenon.
JB: Absolutely. Even for me who knew what the demographics would be, I would have said that more women would have had a moral objection to birth control. It’s sort of like the reverse of that one guy—What’s that wonderful line his wife gave you, “Who leaves the Church but keeps its prohibition on birth control?”
CP: I know, right? That’s a great story. It opens a lot of new conversations for all of us to have about birth control and approaches to family planning. It is certainly true that some of the women I interviewed didn’t believe in using artificial birth control, but they were still planning their families. And so it dispels this idea, which I think you do hear sometimes in more traditional or conservative circles of various faiths, that if we could just turn the clock back on family planning this whole problem would go away. You’re kind of like, “I’m not sure it would. First of all, because we know a lot about how to plan the timing of conceptions without artificial birth control now.”
But also, is this what we really think is an ideal picture of humanity’s office or authority to build and form families? This is my challenge to the traditionalists in all faiths, do we really think that the idea is to return to a time (if there ever really was a time) where people had children unwittingly, as if this particular area of human life is somehow ideally dictated by nature’s vicissitudes and not participation in a rational plan? That cannot be consistent with what I think of as a robust unity of faith and reason. So anyway, there’s more we could talk about there. It opens a lot of really interesting conversations, certainly for the Catholics who do have a position on artificial birth control but often don’t…
JB: Don’t adhere to it very well. [laughter]
CP: … [laughter] often it’s not being followed. But yeah, this is not a story of the kind of Luddites who just refuse to use their minds about when their children are conceived.
JB: No. It would be a little strange if this were the only aspect of our lives we dedicated fully to, as you say, “the vicissitudes of nature.” We don’t go, “Well… antibiotics… let’s just… not use them.” Even though some interventions we do place outside the bounds.
CP: Yeah. That’s right. We’re having this conversation generally about many other things right now. If we were to touch on the MAHA movement a little bit, in how we’re thinking about things like vaccines. Ultimately, you know, you can’t settle these questions by saying it’s artificial or not artificial, right? What we really want is a theory of telos. Does this intervention support its function, or undermine it?
Like what’s the function of your marriage? My subjects are people who generally believe that children are the purpose of their marriages. Now, that’s a pretty strong and distinct view to have. I wouldn’t say that’s remotely universal anymore. Generally people understand that if they’re going to have a kid, it’s going to be in marriage. That norm is still around. But to think of childbearing as the purpose of your marriage, that’s unusual.
JB: And one of the interesting things about your subjects is that while none of them talk about going back, they do talk about a new hybrid of past and future. You quote a woman pseudo-named Kyra, mother of five, who talks about how women can now go into the world and be powerful and important in careers which they couldn’t do sixty-years ago. She says, “And that’s great. That’s wonderful, but we have taken away from the beauty of just staying home and nurturing and loving and teaching.” There is at least a recognition that we, as families, if not specifically women, have lost something. My wife and I have very consciously designed our lives so we are both at home working, so we can be around and teach and care for the children. And I wonder, if we were talking in 1925 instead of 2025, would we then be looking sixty-years in the past saying, “Well, what’s really changed is that men have left the house and are working in factories and offices where they used to be home all the time.” Because one of the strange things about our time is that homes are getting larger and larger, but we use them less and less.
CP: Yes, this is so true. It’s perverse. The parallels are so interesting. And favoring home production or work-from-home arrangements could help for the future. I think they are going to be a huge piece of this puzzle for the people who want to have children. And people like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Erika Bachiochi, to name just a few, are part of a group of thinkers engaging with various aspects of the feminism and post-feminist thought, and I think they’ve done a lovely job of pointing out that one of the many effects of the Industrial Revolution was to pull men out of the home. And later, women as well.
So one of the things you get with the Industrial Revolution is industrial schooling. And industrial schooling looks like exactly what you would do if both mom and dad needed to be out of the home, right?
JB: Yes. Exactly.
CP: You don’t need factory style schools if mom’s at home. There is this set of things that are a really big challenge to a healthy domestic life. Studying the evolution and theories about schooling is a side interest of mine. It’s something I did work on before I did this work. But schooling is substitutive of the work of the mother in the home, right? So if you really wanted to create a situation in which women felt bored or compelled to find something else to do, you would set up a whole bunch of free schools and then convince moms that they weren’t good enough to educate their own children. And actually, we’ve seen that, but now I’m saying stuff that’s really off the topic of my book.
JB: But exactly on one of my favorite subjects in the world.
CP: And I might quickly sound conspiratorial. And yet we have seen things like this before. So for somebody who’s thinking, “Well, the thought that people are setting up schools specifically to give women nothing to do so that they become worker bees like everyone else sounds a little crazy,” well, think about another movement, very catastrophic in the mid-century, which tried to convince women that their breast milk wasn’t good enough. They said, “We have these chemical productions that are much better for your kids.” They told women what they produced was bad for babies. But these chemicals were clean and hygienic, healthier for their babies.
We know now this is all bunk. But there was a systematic campaign, so if people find it really hard to suppose that maybe schooling is a particular attack on the domestic household, think for a second about the way in which the medicalized production of infant formula definitely was an attack on a kind of function of the female body.
So, going back to your original question about the Industrial Revolution and industrial schooling, those two things, they work together. They justified each other. We are still suffering from these terrible approaches to educating children, and they all center around what you described, “To what extent can we envision a world of work and formation of children in which men and women are largely collaborating with each other from a healthy home base where kids are safe.”
And so this has nothing to do with “women don’t work,” right? Like your wife is working, I’m working. It’s nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with how you think of the domestic partnership. Because it’s a real mistake to think that women weren’t always working in some way, partnering up to run family businesses or home enterprises. These are great questions. I’m really fascinated by them.
JB: Yes, and it would be to fixate on mid-twentieth century American experience instead of older or even modern non-Western societies, where women are often primarily interested in home business, &c.
CP: Yes, that would be a mistake. So I teach in a business school. Something I think is really quite lovely is the opportunity to help provide young women with both the tools and the vision to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. And as women who go forward into marriage and family life with the nuts and bolts of how to form a family business. I think of that as like a remarkably pro-family thing to be doing, rather than, say, prepping young women to become the CFO at the big corporation. Those are two different paths. Of course, we don’t discourage the other. But I think of it as a pretty neat thing to be doing.
And just to harp on your point about the 1960s, the language we often hear is, “Well, our economy would be healthier if it were the case that everyone could support a wife and some children on one income.” I think that’s a very dangerous trope. You hear it all the time. And I think it’s dangerous mainly because it’s never really been true. And the concern I have as an economist is, if it’s not really been true and it’s something that’s not very sustainable (and it’s not), what of the good things we’ve achieved could you ruin if you said we’ve got to tear this down and build up a society in which every man could support a wife who’s at home?
This whole topic is hard to write about. I tried to ensure my book didn’t give the impression that people who are at home aren’t working. But it’s not accidental that you have this certain brand of feminist thought that arises in the ‘60s that says, “I’m bored. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got this dishwasher to wash the dishes, the children are at school, &c.” Contrast that with the vision of you and your wife staying home, both working, both taking care of children. And I think this is a challenge for us. It’s always more difficult to describe visions of flourishing and thriving, because there’s many different ways to flourish and thrive. Tolstoy was wrong about this.
JB: Yes!
CP: People ask me, “Well, you teach college and you work a lot, but you’ve got children and how does that work out?” And I say, “Well, number one, I didn’t work and teach and write at this level when my children were young. I didn’t start that until I was 40. But number two, to the extent that it’s been possible, it’s because it’s a family business. Look, my husband’s a college teacher as well. We’re both at home. We trade off in the classroom. Neither one of us needs to be in the classroom more than about five or six hours a week.”
That’s not possible for everyone. But that basic idea is the possibility of flourishing, both mom and dad at home working together. My kids see “dad and mom do something together.” That’s our identity as a domestic partnership. We read a lot of books. We talk about a lot of ideas. We have conversations that probably a lot of people wouldn’t find enjoyable. But when I’m working, I’m strengthening my marriage because it's this thing that we're doing together. Then the kids are actually brought into my work.
It isn’t “work or family.” I think of all of these false dichotomies that have arisen because of what you’ve articulated; they’re really worth questioning. And it’s never been easier to do this with remote work. We’ve arrived at a point where a lot of this is remediable if we look for it. Because here we are talking to each other, I don’t know how many hours away we are, but we’re both at our homes.
JB: We’re about 1,300 miles away, give or take.
CP: Amazing.
JB: Truly a time of miracles. And in your book, you track fertility data. About 20 percent of women had five or more children in 1976. That number fell to 5 percent in 1990 and has stayed constant since. And yet our birth rate continues to fall. So 5 percent are still having these large families, what is happening to the rest of the population?
CP: A lot of movement towards zero. So this is a great question and something I’m about to, God willing, tackle. What I would really like to do is present people a picture of what those buckets look like. I have a couple of snapshots.
So you could look at 1976 to 1990, that five-plus bucket shrinks down a bit. But then after 1990 that group stays the same. So, as you say, what happens if birth rates are falling? Well, what’s happening is that while the 5 percent are staying up there, in the lower buckets you’re seeing an increase in the number of people who are terminally childless, as well as more in the one- and two-child buckets.
But this really underscores the difficulty of using averages to see what’s happening in a society. I'm going to hedge a little bit on this (because this is work in progress), but I believe we know that the 5 percent number in the United States is bigger than in most European countries, whereas that 5 percent number is below the number for Israel, where the percent of women who have larger families is more like 15 to 18 percent.
This underscores the problem with the TFR [total fertility rate]. The TFR is a prediction based on averages. So you could have a TFR of, let’s just pick a number, two if every woman in your society goes on to have exactly two children, or you could have a TFR of two if a whole bunch of people have three and a whole bunch of people have one, right? The really fascinating question is, “What will be the role going forward of these larger families?” I don’t think you need to have massive numbers of people with five or eight children. Take Israel again, 15 to 18 percent of the women have larger families, and their TFR is well over two. Is that a more sustainable future, a split between people who have more children and people who have fewer?
I think probably that’s where we could be headed in the United States. We really have to see what these dynamics will look like. Are these five-percenters, are they growing a little bit? And that’s actually something we want to look at. It looks like there’s a slight inflection upward of the threes and the fours. So we’ll see.
JB: Yeah, that would not surprise me, belonging to that parish homeschool group where the TFR is probably closer to five.
CP: Yeah, exactly, right? It’s amazing, because you’re like, “When is this going to show up in the numbers,” right? “It should be there!”
JB: There are some people, especially in our high birth rate circles, who will say, “It’s a problem for them but, in two generations, it’s going to be all our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and those children are all going to be having four or five children.”
There’re two questions there. One is, “How much are high birth rates heritable, if not genetically then at least culturally?” You seem to suggest it’s quite a lot because something like 45 percent of the women in your sample come from families who themselves would qualify for the sample [five or more children], and if you expand that to four or more children, I think the number you gave was 65 percent. It seems there’s some continuity.
The second question is, should we just, to be crass, go “Well, sucks for you but we’ll be fine”?
CP: Well, let’s take the first question. So it’s a really interesting question. Heritability would imply that it’s like a genetic thing, and some people really think there might be. But I’m not sure I see any good reason to suppose that that tendency to pass on a propensity to have children would be the same over time.
First of all, the people I interviewed are not a representative sample. So to answer that question in the same cohorts, I would have to go back to some representative data sets and actually look at that question. I could do it, it shouldn’t take very long, and then I would be able to put real numbers on those percentages you just quoted.
Now, I suspect that if there’s a genetic component to the propensity to have children, either in terms of natural fecundity, just like you happen to be really fertile, or that you really like kids, that this genetic component might have been a bigger piece of the story prior to hormonal birth control. But I’m not so certain that that should be true anymore, because now you’d really need to focus on the desire for children as a heritable trait rather than actual fecundity.
What I certainly wanted to bring to the front in these stories was what I would call “fertility intention.” You may see people saying today that it’s not that people want fewer children in the past, it’s really that they’re not getting married early enough. And that if you just focus on married people, the TFR hasn’t changed very much. That is to say, the problem isn’t the demand story that I’m telling you but some almost mechanical explanation. Like if you just get married at some point, you’ll crank out a couple kids, right?
I’m challenging that. I’m saying in the era of really good birth control, you have to look at intention. My hypothesis is that if you were born after 1960 or 1970, when families began rejecting the idea that a good life meant definitely having kids, and when many didn’t assign a high value to childbearing in relation to other things—bear with me—and if instead you were born into the kind of family like I was born into where your parents said, “We are doing something different, living intentionally the kind of life where kids are a priority and we’re arranging our life to have them,” my suspicion is that that level of intentionality is probably pretty pass-on-able. It wouldn’t be one for one, but it would be pretty high and interesting. That’s my guess. For example—I’m one of nine kids, and I have eight kids. Most of my siblings do not have eight, but the average is about three, and only two of the nine have zero (so far)—some of my siblings aren’t done with their families yet.
The second thing you asked was should we just say, “That sucks for them, but we’ll be fine.” So no [both laugh]. I never think callousness is a good response to any sort of social problem, but I do think a couple of things. You just mentioned how, in my data 40 percent or 60 percent grew up in families that are quite large. But what about the other side? What about the 40 to 60 percent, depending on how you tell that story, who grew up in small families? What I discovered, which is very interesting, is that lots of people change. So you said you grew up in a different family, do you have siblings?
JB: I’m an only child. And I marked that, a specific quotation; “I was an only child. So, I yearned for family my whole life.” That was me.
CP: See, you’re in my data! And so that's a question we don’t know a lot about, how possible is it for people to see a lifestyle that’s different from what they grew up with and choose it? If I were to say, “Hey, look, 90 percent of the people in my sample came from larger families,” the response would be, “Huh, okay, it’s really a thing that’s happening through being passed down.” Instead I found lots of people who grew up wishing they had more siblings, and for others it was more like St. Paul, knocked off your horse. They were looking for God, they were looking for the meaning of life, they were looking for meaning in a sea of hopelessness, and they went, “Oh, marriage, children, it’s all a part of this package. And I may be ill-equipped to do this. I may not have ever held a human infant, but I’m going to do it.”
So I think that’s the wild card. The back-of-the-envelope calculations, such as Lyman Stone offers on X from time-to-time, suggest the future is not going to be composed of people with lots of kids. I think Lyman wants to refute that idea that society will become more religious mechanically, from religious people having more kids. But the wild card for those calculations is conversion, and I don’t just mean religious conversion. I mean conversion to this other way of life that seeks children and a domestic ideal of excellence.
And so I suspect that as the social structures that give people confidence in the future fail, like take for example social welfare—we have enjoyed in society a very generous system of social welfare. You’re going to retire with benefits; if you fall unemployed, there’s going to be something for you; these replace the traditional things that families do, right? We could think of them that way—And so my suspicion is that those things will go away, not because I want them to go away, but because we will not be able to afford them with collapsing birth rates.
JB: Because the math doesn’t math.
CP: The math does not math. And so that people will probably be inclined to look at this other way of life. And some people will find it desirable. And so that’s why these projections that are based on back-of-the-envelope calculations will typically be incorrect. You know, you said something at the beginning which I really loved, which is that it’s possible to be exposed to something that we deeply affirm but that we actually loved before we even knew it existed, right? And then, when we see it, we go, “I’ve loved this all this time, and I didn’t know it existed.”
I think that’s the way many of us feel about the supernatural and divine. We’ve loved God and then finally God reveals himself to us. It could be through an infant, through some loving relationship in our lives, or through beauty. I mean, how many people have climbed a mountain and said, okay, like I was never religious, but I’m on my knees like weeping. Because this is not an accident.
JB: Coleridge at the waterfall.
CP: Yes, I think that’s so hard to put words to. But it’s so true. This is the sense in which there’s a wild card, because what will happen is that people will see a thing that they may, in fact, already love, and they didn’t know that they loved it, they didn’t know that it existed, and that it was a hole in their heart. People choose to have children because they want them deeply, but I don’t mean it is a choice in the sense of an abstract bundle of things that people think will make them happy.
There is a question about whether or not children make us happy and whether marriage makes us happy and whether faith makes us happy. Not happy in a superficial sense. You told me before this started you had a baby with an ear infection recently. That doesn’t make one “happy.” What I mean is fulfilled in a deep way, even if we’re still suffering. Somebody said to me one time, “Do you think that it’s healthy for you, having all those kids?” And I thought, “Well, in one sense, yes.” But in another sense, I mean, my legs are not the same, you know? And my abs are not the same. So if health means I stay looking like a twenty-year-old, it’s definitely not healthy.
I’m not super agnostic about the answers. I suggest throughout the book that the preferences, the desires, of the women I profile to have all these children aren’t irrelevant to their sense of self-fulfillment. I make a pretty strong claim there that this can be a real path to fulfillment. I’m teeing it up for the philosophers and the theologians, but I think that what you’ve articulated is really deep and beautiful.
JB: You just said that while it may have seemed unhealthy in some ways, but it was actually healthy in others. That reminds me of a summation you give in your book. A woman in your book, pseudo-named Rosalie, had nine children and her seventh had severe disabilities. You write, “But baby number seven, with all of his needs, saved her other children from disabilities of the soul.”
CP: Oh, it’s a great story.
JB: Spectacular. And what I find so shocking, one of those things where you’re shocked and not surprised simultaneously, is how much closeness with death whets a desire for more life. So I have about eight quotations, but here are just two:
“Life is never as precious as when you realize how brief it is, how fragile it is.”
“I remember at my baby’s funeral just feeling this overwhelming sense of, I was just honored that God chose me to carry this little baby even if it was just for sixteen weeks, because I said ‘The soul is going to live forever and ever and ever.’”
This reminds me of old Catholic wisdom—Memento Mori, “think upon your death” or “remember that you will die.” I don’t have a specific question, I just hope you would talk about it more.
CP: Depending on the day of the week I can get quite emotional. The first point about death, this is interesting, right? We know that as child mortality has fallen, people have fewer children. The normal demographic explanation is just, “Well, people have a target family size that they want, and if they really want to end up with three kids, they’d once had to have six if half of them are going to die.” And I think some of that is clearly at play.
But I heard so many stories about how we don’t appreciate the value of things until we lose them. I was attuned to this a little bit because I married a widower who lost his first wife to breast cancer. A lot of people were happy for him, happy for the children that they would be part of a whole family again. But there were a lot of people who were really doubtful that it could work out well. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve appreciated their concerns more, right? Because I go, “Well, let’s see, I’m in my 40s now. What would I think about a twenty-year-old marrying a forty-year-old with a lot of kids?”
But one of the things that was said by a lot of people, which has proved to be just a misnomer, was, “Well, you know, you’re going to be like the second wife. He’s not going to appreciate you as much, because the first cut is the deepest.” But my husband said, “Well, no, it goes the other way. You appreciate a wife more when you’ve lost a wife.” And I never heard that in a manner of like reducing the value of his first wife, who he loved deeply and still does. But rather that there’s something really important about loss, that loss causes us to stop and reflect about the great incommensurable good that we’ve lost.
So I entered marriage with this death that was hanging over it, and we had our first child. People, again, said, “Maybe be careful, your children aren’t ready for a new baby to come into the family. It would be confusing and blended and so on.” And on the contrary, this baby arrived and fixed everything. I mean, we still had a path to walk, but the baby was this unifying force that brought our blendedness together. And so really it laid a foundation for me thinking about the relationship between death and appreciating the value of life.
We could think about some of the biblical language, “You’ve been bought at a great price.” Your salvation is so valuable because of the death of Jesus. And classical Christian teaching is that the Christ didn’t have to die to purchase salvation. He could have snapped his fingers. I mean, he’s God. So why did he choose to die? Precisely, it seems, to show the depth of his love. And so it’s not just the value of life that we appreciate in death but also like there’s an impulse to love.
To this point about disabilities of the soul, there are any number of institutes, organizations, &c dedicated to the well-being of children. And most of them are quite good. But while we’ve been single-mindedly obsessed with what contributes to the well-being of children, we have not thought much at all about the way in which children contribute to our well-being. And that may contribute to the collapse of demand, right?
I was just watching a Jim Gaffigan skit where he said, “You’re not really an adult if you don’t have a child. You’re a junior adult.” And you hear this from people, but that’s a defective reason to have a child. It’s a self-centered motive. But there’s this other sense, a sort of Mystery which Rosalie gives where because you love the child, because the child is wanted for the child’s sake, you observe what we could call a beneficent effect on us and on our on our children. That’s what we’re all after.
We want to know now how do we raise children who are less self-centered? How do we raise pro-social human beings? How do we raise children who are less anxious? It seemed rather compelling to me that one of the benefits of being the kind of person who just thinks more children would be great—whether they’re tall, short, disabled, not disabled, you just believe that children are a blessing and you arrange your life to have them—is that quite apart from your intention, all of these children end up making each other better and maybe enhancing your own life.
I had to spend so much time on it is because it’s really important not to get the order of things wrong. Rosalie didn’t have that child in order to help her disabled baby, right? But then here she is describing this utter miracle. And I think we’ve all been that person who, at some point, says, “You know, I never thought having this child was going to—I don’t know—make me convert, make me get up in the morning, all of these other things.” And yet, we see, “Oh gosh, my kid has been such a great blessing to me,” apart from his or her transcendent and universal value.
JB: I wonder if we all have these stories, because the second child I told you about, she would not exist but for a miscarriage. My wife had a miscarriage about three or four months before our second was conceived, and that pregnancy was fairly early. So if she had brought that first child to term, our living child wouldn’t exist. And it’s just… it’s such a strange place to be in because you mourn the first and celebrate the second.
CP: Yeah. It is. Yeah.
JB: And you’ll forgive me for being presumptuous, but I bet your whole life in some ways feels like that.
CP: Oh, yeah, for sure. I’ve said it explicitly more than once. I can’t imagine my life without my children, right? But none of them would be here if a lovely, bright, talented lady hadn’t dropped dead of cancer at the age of forty. That’s an unspeakable tragedy, an unspeakable sadness. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. And yet she did die. She thought of it, potentially, as the mercy of God. She prayed that her husband would find a new wife. She, in a sense, passed off her children to me. And then every one of the children born afterwards is, in a sense, a kind of fruit of her death. That’s really very difficult to write or to say in some contexts. Like, “What are you saying?”
And yet, there’s a deep pattern of death and life that’s built into the rhythm of life, right? We look around and we realize that, to survive, we have to eat animals that have given up their lives. Right now we’re in spring, and we see that spring follows upon a season of death. And there’s something to recognizing that in this life, life is in a constant dynamic with death. And we understand that in the future life, right, that will not be the case. We will have the life without the death.
But then you recognize that the price of life is the acceptance of death. You can either accept that, which is a kind of profound humility, or you can reject it. And I think rejecting it inevitably leads to forming a new competitive culture of death. It’s competing with the Creator’s limits on us, for in this life, death is what happens. We don’t like that, so we end up choosing our own death, and our own patterns of death. Did you watch those stories about what the archaeological discovery of the Guatemalan sacrifices? And they said, “Well, the human sacrifices weren’t, you know, violent. It was just like their whole culture.” [Links here, here, and here.]
JB: Yes! [Both laugh]
CP: But ultimately this is what we do if we reject the creator’s vision, which clearly involves death. It seems as if we inevitably create cults of death. And they look different at different times. It’s an abortion culture, it’s a child sacrifice culture, it’s a mutilation of the body culture, whatever that is. And it seems like you get one or the other. It’s mystery, and I can’t untangle it. All I can say is that I… I really believe that the God who made it this way is beautiful and lovable and that what is on offer is sort of a path to conquering death. But that I have to be patient and accepting to go about it His way.
JB: There’s so much there. I actually saw below one of the post about the Guatemalan sacrifices, it said “Altar 2025, Colorized” and it was just a Planned Parenthood clinic.
CP: Exactly. No, it’s wild. It’s wild.
JB: Quoting from the book again, “If you are going to have a lot of babies… your husband is either going to be a total jerk or he’s going to become a hero.” There’s about a dozen of these too, and it reminds me of what I’ve long said, “Parenthood is alchemical. It either turns you to gold or burns you up.” This goes back to the dying thing; we talk in the Church and in the West generally about dying to oneself. So would you speak to what having many children does to families, and especially for younger children, because I noticed in the book and in this conversation we keep talking about how older children grow because of the younger. I’m curious how the younger grow.
CP: To skip right from the sublime to the ridiculous, we’re living through this time when everybody’s over-parented. But in a large family, the younger children are clearly freed up from some over-parenting. This is one of the best things for children. For the eldest in the families, there’s always an inescapable amount of over-parenting. The parents haven’t learned how to be good parents yet.
JB: Yeah. It’s a shame most people stop just after they get good at it.
CP: Yes, that’s exactly right. The younger kids are just much more relaxed, cool human beings. I can say this as an eldest; I’m not that relaxed, cool, younger child. And there are other neat things about the younger children too. They know their parents at a different time. The elder children tend to see their parents almost like peers, which doesn’t make sense because they’re twenty years or maybe thirty years younger.
But there’s a sense which the parents identify with their older children in ways that are probably not always salutary. They want them to achieve and to be things which reflect their own aspirations and, oftentimes, shortcomings and insecurities. When you’ve got lots of kids, you run out of things you want your kids to be because you weren’t able to do it. All of that pressure is gone.
JB: You already have the doctor and the lawyer and the accountant. You don’t need anyone else.
CP: Yes. And, when you have a lot of kids, you let go of this idea that you can craft the children to become these perfect beings that have everything you didn’t. You have to let go. So then the younger kids have completely different parents. If they keep going that far, the parents are by definition more relaxed and, in a sense, love the children more purely. That’s been my experience. With our first few children, it seemed more of a temptation to love them selfishly, if that makes sense.
In part, they fill your needs. The kids are the first people who love you without qualification, like even your spouse ultimately loves you with some qualification. Your parents probably wanted certain things from you. That baby is born. Like, man, that kid… you could just be, you know, Cyrano de Bergerac—ugly, or awkward, successful, or not. That kid just adores you.
That love is really powerful. But then what happens is they love us so much, we kind of need them. We’re like, “It’s pretty nice having you around.” And it becomes a little conflicted and selfish. But with those younger children, it’s much easier to love them in a pure way. Because all of those psychological weirdnesses, all that is taken out with our kids; you said, “burned out,” it does kind of burn away after a while. And at some point you’re like, “Oh, this is just what’s happening. God is blessing us with more children. There’re more people to love; this is just amazing.” It’s not all bound up with your psyche as much. And so there’s some really special things about being the younger kids in larger families.
JB: You write about your own family in this way. After you had your seventh, an older daughter was playing with him on the floor and said, “We didn’t know we needed a Finnan, but we did!” You also write about how two of your most moving experiences in high school were when new siblings entered the family. I’ve long argued to my friends that we speak about teenagers wanting to rebel, but I don’t think they do.
You would know much better than I, so correct me if I’m wrong, but from my own and friends’ experiences growing up, what teenagers want is not rebellion but purpose and responsibility. And we’ve destroyed any chance for responsibility. Like we’ve just taken absolutely everything. They can’t work. They can’t build. They can’t go out on their own. They have no family responsibilities. And so the only thing open to them is this “bad-to-the-bone” rebellion nonsense.
CP: Yeah, I love this topic. And it goes back to my pet peeves and serious concerns about how we do education. This is one of these things that larger families show us. If only there were a way to create an environment in which our children had to rise to an occasion to do things, right? Without actually being the strange parent who’s like, “I don’t want to raise a child with nothing to do, so I’m going to force you to go to work.”
If you have one child or two, you might recognize they have no responsibility, and then you could create artificial responsibilities for them, but they’re still created and they’re still artificial. What we want to happen is some organic set of needs arises and kids jump in there and they’re useful. I’m not saying you couldn’t do something different with your smaller family, but that there’s something fascinating about what happens in larger families.
Your ten-year-old is not just a ten-year-old. He also buckles all the kids into the car seats. That was my Liberation Day, when my oldest child said, “I’m doing the car seats.” So I had three other kids after him at that point, and I thought, “Okay, this is amazing. So now what I get to do when we travel anywhere is just send Joseph out there and he’s going to buckle in three kids.” But to your other point, living a homeschooled-oriented life makes that possible. Your older kids aren’t there to help you or to take responsibility if they’re at school all day.
JB: Yes!
CP: So I do think there’s a kind of a larger family culture that may involve domestic schooling as well. But it’s phenomenal to see, strapping the younger siblings in, or the kid that is making a lunch or putting the baby to sleep. It’s offering help and support to parents, but it’s more magical than that, right? Because it’s actually shaping these young people in ways that are salutary. Because it’s not just work. Because the payoff is you’re a ten-year-old who’s a superhero, right? You’re a ten-year-old with three little sidekicks who think whatever you build, whatever story you decide to read, it’s the best thing ever.
JB: And they don’t even have to be that old. My eldest, who’s not quite five, she unbuckles her siblings from their car seats. She can’t quite buckle them in, but she can unbuckle them. It reminds me of a story which you might enjoy. You might already know it. In the teenage pregnancy scares in the 90s, they made the—you know this, from the way you’re smiling.
CP: Like the dolls? Yes. I do know this, yeah. [What happened was that schools gave out babydolls which would cry at all hours, demanding changing, feeding, &c. They assumed the amount of work and discomfort would scare teenagers off having children and lower the teen pregnancy rate. It rose.]
JB: It’s such a great example of not understanding the basic issue at play. I think the reason why the dolls spurred teenage pregnancy instead of delaying it is because the teens were suddenly necessary in a real and valuable way, even if it was ultimately fake. It’s more impressive that it was fake.
CP: Right. Needing to be needed.
JB: Exactly.
So we’ve talked about the facts of the birth dearth and why having many children is such a blessing, but can we talk a bit about how people and governments are responding to the birth dearth, I’m thinking of the Hungarian example in particular because you don’t think very highly of their attempts. Why has it failed?
CP: Sure. Because I’m very negative about those examples, I want to highlight that I share the intuition behind them, that people are rational choosers who respond to incentives. What I’ve highlighted in my book is that what gets people over the economic calculus where demand falls as we get wealthier because opportunity costs rise, is some big thing which puts weight on the scales. And so the problem is that the weight policymakers can put on the scale, a check or something, is not enough.
The baby bonuses haven’t worked not because people are inept or are irrational or don’t get it. It’s because those bonuses are not big enough to counterbalance both the costs in money on the one hand and that big opportunity cost, my music career, the things that I love, on the other hand. They simply don’t create enough weight to overcome the difficulties. That’s all.
Incentives do matter. I just wrote a book about it, which explains why I think having many children is a rational set-up. But having a child is pretty hard, it’s a pretty big undertaking. And so what really gets people over the hump is something that’s transcendent and long lasting. These baby bonuses are typically targeted in the year that you have the child. And anybody normal thinks, “I’m going to be dealing with this baby for the rest of my life.” So the $5,000 baby bonuses the Trump administration proposed just won’t cut it because they don’t work on the right margin.
And if you said, “What if we made them huge, massive, like half a million dollars.” Well, then they would be obviously retrogressive, right? We would be inducing people to have children, and it wouldn’t be randomly distributed. It would be certain people who really needed the money. If you’re in that place where you're like, “Well, we’ve got to put these massive incentives on childbirth,” obviously you’ve got a lot of big problems, and you’re not going to solve it with retrogressive payments that induce poor people to have children through an alternative income. And that assumes countries had that kind of money. They don’t.
JB: But you do say what might work. At the end, you write, “The policy lesson is simple: the flourishing of traditional religious institutions breaks the low-marriage-low-fertility cycle. People will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies. If the state can’t save the American family, it can give religion a freer rein to try. Religion is the cardinal family policy.” And then shortly after that, you rhetorically ask, “So what would that policy look like?” Your answer is, “thick religious liberty,” which means “at a minimum, emancipating religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education.” Please describe what “thick religious liberty” looks like.
CP: Well, so earlier I mentioned the situation where the State has taken on some things that I said are natural functions of the family, like taking on pension programs. And, if you didn’t have family to take care of you, you were generally recognized to be poor in a deep sense. We really feel sorry for you, somebody has to step-in. And oftentimes it was religious orders who did the stepping-in.
JB: Widows and orphans.
CP: Exactly. And one of the questions we debate today is why have we become such a secular society? So if you asked “why does the Church exist,” one approach, a theological approach, is to say, “Because the Church is founded by Jesus Christ and it’s True.” Another approach we could take is, “What’s its sociological function? What have churches understood themselves to be doing in society?” And you can find this all the way back to the Acts of the Apostles, right? So yes, it’s True. It’s a path to salvation. It’s an invitation to follow a disciple after Christ. (And, by the way, I don’t think this would largely look very different if we got outside the Christian tradition.)
But then what’s its social function? Looking after widows and orphans! So this is in St. James: “True religion is to look after widows and orphans.” The job or function of the people of God has typically been understood to look after people whose family don’t exist. Well, is that just sort of like a nice thing to do? No, it’s actually pretty intertwined with the salvific or theological mission of the Church. Our bodily and community needs are not ultimately separated from our ultimate ends.
And so the proposition of those last few paragraphs of my book is that if it’s strong, traditional religious belief that tends to give rise to the kind of motive for childbearing, then we have to ask the question, “Well, what would we need to do to have stronger religious communities?” And I won’t be the person who says, “We have to sell everybody on a set of intellectual ideas; religious communities have always grown by meeting people’s needs.”
The basic idea is that we may have thin religious liberty, like freedom to worship, but how thick is it? Are there other institutions that are doing the job of the people of God and preventing the natural transition from “these people meet my needs” to “these people have something true to offer”?
This is a pattern that’s pretty scriptural. This is what’s happening as Jesus goes around. He’s like, “Before I give you some Good Ideas about how to live your life, here’s a fish, here’s some bread, let me heal your sickness.” Is it just that Jesus is this mad miracle worker? I mean, he is. But what did he do? He said to his apostles, “Go out, feed people, heal them, preach in my name.” So my view of religious liberty is that when the state or other public communities that are explicitly secular, when they aim to meet those needs, healing, teaching, preaching, feeding, clothing, visiting the imprisoned, all of those things, when they do those things they, in a sense, actually oppress religious communities by depriving them of their function. If you deprive anybody of their function, like we talked about with the kids, they’re not needed.
JB: They atrophy.
CP: I get my groceries at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or Aldi’s. I get my hair cut over here. I go to dinner over there. Now I’m homeschooling my kids. At what point in my week do I need my church? That’s a concern.
I personally have very strong religious belief, as a gift from God. I’m thankful for that. But if I didn’t have strong religious belief, when would I be saying to myself, “You know, what I really need to do is get myself down to the local Catholic church because they’ve got something I really, really need.” That’s basically a thing that nobody says anywhere anymore, right? That is the kind of religious liberty I’m talking about.
The easiest way to think about this in today’s policy context is schooling. Clearly public schooling has crowded out churches’ ability to offer schools, both fiscally and just sucking up the energy in the room. But not simply that. Most hospitals once had crucifixes in every room. These were charities, not big businesses. Their replacement was not a big anti-religious project. It was good people, probably motivated by faith, thinking “I could set up this thing over here.” And then the thing just happens to be a secular enterprise and it’s kind of an accidental secularizing force.
JB: We’re struggling over here. If we get the government to help us out, we’ll really be doing better work and then…
CP: Yeah, that’s right. And then you have to live within the confines of your constitutional structure, secular. That’s a bigger conversation, but what I mean by “thick religious liberty” is, “Do we live in a society where churches are not out-competed in providing people's needs?” Because I suspect that if churches met more needs, the passing off of pro-natal values would be more common. That’s the sketch.
JB: And perhaps that’s why the little religious revival we’re seeing is really taking off, because there are now needs that the government is unable to meet. Interpersonal, relational, needs which the Church is still perfectly positioned to meet.
CP: I think that’s right. And as the state entities can do less—I mean, these schools are going to close. There are not going to be enough students to fill them, for one thing.
JB: I mean, as you keep saying, we’re bankrupt.
CP: That’s right; we’re bankrupt.
JB: And getting people to understand that is almost a fool’s errand, because we look so wealthy. And we are so wealthy in so many ways.
CP: Yeah. We are very, very wealthy. The question is whether we could spend a lot of other people’s money anymore.
JB: Because we’re so wealthy, our social support has to match the average life. It has to keep people in this sort of wealthy environment and—yeah, explaining this to people is impossible.
CP: Yeah, it is somewhat impossible. It’s funny. When spoke about my book in Italy, saying that the government has to get out of the business of doing all these things, which is a much more heretical thing in Italy than here, even though they’re closer to the cliff than we are. And they said things like, “Well, this is really shocking what you’re saying. And it’s really kind of brave; no one speaks like this.” And I said, “I don’t think this is very brave. I don’t have any vanity in Italy.” And I said to them, “You know, we’re having this discussion back home too. And I don’t care whether I can persuade anybody; my view will prevail, at least in the sense that, whether or not we should have these programs, we won’t be able to have them. We will really run out of money. We’ll be increasingly paring down national expenditures to the things we have to not go without, such as some level of national defense. These big wealth transfers from young people to old people, they’re just not going to be sustainable.” As you said, you might not convince them in advance, but at some point it’ll come home to roost.
And, you know, we never mentioned it to them, but my sons always said, just naturally, “Well, when I get my first big paycheck, mom, it’s going to be so rewarding to send something to you and dad.” And it’s funny where that comes from, because we don’t talk about that. And we don’t need their money right now, thanks be to God. And I remember thinking that myself, I remember thinking my dad, my dad who worked two jobs and was always tired, and I used to think, “Oh, someday I’ll make it, I’ll send them big money. It’ll be great.” I think it’s such a natural thing for children to want to do. And now I’m not saying that there’s no answer for the people who don’t have children. I am saying that it’s a really bizarre thing that we thought, “Instead of having each person take care of his own parents, everybody should chip in some like fixed amount and then we’ll send it to everybody’s parents.” It’s like, it’s kind of, it’s kind of communist actually.
JB: I definitely remember the same feeling.
The last question: A woman you pseudo-named Terry related a conversation she had with her mom, who said, “I just want you to know that we’re sending you to a Catholic prep school and we’re so proud of you for how well you do academically, but we just want you to know that you can… do as much as you want with your education, but that we really… would value… if you became a mom and all of that education wouldn’t be wasted, it would contribute to you as a mom, and remember that your vocation is more important than your career.”
Almost none of us have even an implicit conversation with parents like that. We are told by everyone around us how to prepare for our career, and that’s not a bad thing, but we’re never told “This is how you prepare for life.” So the two questions are, 1. what was the advice you gave your children about getting their ducks in the row, and 2. then what is the advice for someone who hasn't had this conversation with his parents, what does this planning look like in practice?
CP: I’m quite optimistic. I think that information is the most powerful thing in the world. I think about when we went through the COVID lockdowns. One thing we learned after the lockdowns was that people had naturally curtailed their behavior prior to being told to stay home. So most of the benefit of the lockdown period, if there were benefits, came from people voluntarily saying, “Oh, there’s a dangerous disease. I should stay home.”
In other words, people are pretty good at responding and changing their actions to match reliable information. And the problem is young women and young men haven’t been offered reliable information ranging from “You have to plan for this, it won’t just happen,” to “You’re most fertile in your 20s and not in your 30s—forget about the 40s.” The best sort of advice you can give is, in a sense, the types of things that are in my book. And I don’t mean that so people buy my book. I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that reading about how other people planned for children is the most helpful advice you can offer, I think. And hopefully I will write more things.
JB: But people should definitely go buy your book.
CP: But let me just tell you that it’s happening to me over and over and over. I was just at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. A young woman who grew up in a large family but didn’t really feel drawn to it, she sat herself down across from me at dinner and said, “I listened to your book twice. It changed me. I didn’t want my mom’s life. Now I do.” And I keep hearing this over and over and over. So like all you need is the information that this is a lovable life, a beautiful life, and available to us. Information gives people the reason to make the decisions that make it possible.
If part of what’s happened is that people aren’t choosing a thing because they’ve never been told how much they’ll love their child, they can’t imagine what it means to be loved by another human being that way, and all they need to do is see it, then just sharing testimony will do it. I think we may see a kind of course correction.
We do this sort of thing all the time. One of my favorite examples right now is the way that from the ‘50s to the ‘70s, we were very busy about building affordable houses for people to live in. We build all these suburbs. We forgot to think about whether people would like to walk places. We did not build walkable communities at scale. Well, now we realize that was a big mistake for community life, for health, for the lifestyles of Americans getting into cars all the time. So now we’re just doing it differently. You can’t really build family housing now if you don’t demonstrate how it’s walkable.
We do have this capacity as human beings to evaluate our decisions and recognize that we’ve gone too far in one direction. So now you see even influencers with kids and it doesn’t look all that bad. That wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. It was just not a thing. There was a narrative with no alternative media. So I’m optimistic that leaning into sharing stories of happy families and fulfilling parenting can do a lot of the work.
The advice I give my children is probably similar. The most powerful way to pass on your values to your children is to live an integrated life. And what I mean there is children do what we do. They don’t do what we say, right? So it’s pretty hard to prepare your kids to grow up and have kids if you put having kids last.
I had a really interesting conversation with Bryan Caplan a couple of weeks ago. He’s an economist at George Mason. One of the things that was most memorable for me from that conversation was his experience growing up. He said that his mom really didn’t seem to enjoy having children and complained a lot about it, and that is, of course, really sad if you’re the son. I mean, it’s sad to think about what that looks like, right?
I don’t think there’s a deeper secret than that. You will pass on your own experience with children to your children, and so if you’re struggling to enjoy your children as much as you think you would like to, that's probably something you can work on. We’re learners. So seek out friends and companions who seem to be further along the road. I’ve gotten great advice over the years from women a little bit older than I am, and my husband from older dads. My husband is like you, not an only child but from a very small family, and he didn’t even want children but for a kind of conversion. He’s become a great father, but I don’t think he started out a great father. He had to learn it.
JB: I’m almost certain I didn’t.
CP: So I just want to say explicitly that it’s not impossible to come to a place of greater enjoyment, just like we know you can work on a tough marriage. Some people have tough marriages, and people say, “Well, you got to just give up and walk away.” No, actually, there’s a lot of things you can do. And I think there's a lot of hope for parents who maybe with the toddler years or the baby years, they’re just thinking, “I don’t enjoy this very much, but I’d like to get better at it.” You can! There's a lot of hope there.
JB: Yes. And again, it’s a shame that so many people have so few children, because after two or three you actually start getting good at it. I’m not sure if I’m good at it yet, but I’m okay at it at least.
CP: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. You actually get better at it. Danielle, from chapter fourteen, mentions that it’s a skill, and you can get better at it. And if you can get better at it, it can become easier like anything else.
People look at me sometimes, and they go like, “How could you do it?” Well, I say, “Having six isn’t the same as having like six times one.” It’s just a lot easier. But because people don’t know this, they go, “Oh, having my first child was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And I couldn’t do the hardest thing I’ve ever done for another 10 years, like I couldn’t do that.”
JB: I only have three, but still we get down to even two let alone one, it’s just like I’m not even doing anything. It’s automatic. And it was really hard when I first had only one.
CP: Yeah, no, that’s right. People ask me all the time, “How do you do all this work?” And I’m like, “I’m not even raising kids anymore. I’ve got like four kids still at home. I feel like I did all my parenting. They’re being half raised by their older siblings. I feel like I’ve got roommates that I like rather than kids I have to work at,” you know? That’s a little glib, but it really is true. It really does get easier.
JB: Thank you so much for your time because I know we’ve run over it pretty extravagantly.
CP: You’re so welcome.
