Why are large families good – not just for the children, the family itself, but society at large. Join Simon as he sits down with author Dr Catherine Pakaluk, a Harvard educated economist and social philosopher, and mother to eight, as she shares her personal and professional insights.
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Simon O’Connor: Hi everyone. Welcome to Family Matters. I’m extremely excited to introduce our next guest. She brings an array of skills and she talks into an area not just from the academic but the practical side which we here at Family First, have a big heart for which is motherhood and kids, in fact, lots of kids.
So if I might to welcome Dr. Catherine Pakaluk, have I said that right?
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s close to it.
Simon O’Connor: Apology. What’s the etymology, if you don’t mind of that surname?
Catherine Pakaluk: That name is Ukrainian. Oh.
Simon O’Connor: That in it in itself Catherine, if I might be informal as a kiwi is want to be, is quite an important element of obviously everything that’s happening in the world at the moment.
But look, welcome to the show. I’ll just introduce you a little bit more to our viewers and listeners as I say. Dr. Catherine Pakaluk is actually an associate professor, an economist, and social philosopher at the Catholic University of America which is in itself amazing. Harvard educated and importantly a mother of eight, which makes me a stepfather of five look like an amateur. And I think I read somewhere online. Catherine, you’ve got, is it 29 grandchildren?
Catherine Pakaluk: As of now, it’s 33. Oh my. Yeah, 33.
Simon O’Connor: I wondered as I was doing, please.
Catherine Pakaluk: Go ahead. Just today, I was counting it up. I thought, oh no, I think we’ve got to update the number We have three in utero.
It, 29 was a couple years ago, but there are three buns in the oven.
Simon O’Connor: We say it down here as well with, I said five step kids, several married off, but we haven’t got the grandkids yet, so if they’re watching and learning, Rachel and I are keen. But I had also wondered whether or not the information online might have been slightly out of date.
And of course, you are the author of a book called ‘Hannah’s Children – The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Death’. And that’s primarily I want to chat with you today about. But if you don’t mind, Catherine, there was a wonderful – and you sent it to me kindly in the copy of the book – a wonderful testimony, if you will, or a affirmation from someone Janice Breidenbach.
And I thought, if you don’t mind, I’d like to read it out because I think it sums up and gives you a bit of a sense of what we’re about to talk into. because she says:
“it’s a beautiful celebration of motherhood, showcasing the rich complexity, social, economic, and personal of human love. Catherine Pakaluk makes the compelling case for having a large family in a modern context of adult autonomy and hyper individualism. Informed by a multidisciplinary study canvasing economics, history, sociology, and philosophy. Hannah’s children joins the slim ranks of other groundbreaking ethnographic studies on marriage, maternity, and demography.
And within the narratives of human natality, Pakaluk reveals the possibility of greater gain within self-sacrifice advantage in accepted opportunity costs and expansion of self within the gestation growth and gift of other persons.”
Wow. Wow. So that’s just to give our viewers a bit of a heads up.
So can tell us a little bit if you don’t mind, of yourself and then of this profound book.
Catherine Pakaluk: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure to hear those words after first reading them quite some time ago. And something that, it’s never easier. It’s never, it never becomes easy to listen to praise about one’s work.
And but I will say, let’s see I’m, I was trained as an economist, a sort of regular mainstream economist. And the truth is, and for fact for this podcast, just to make it very clear, I became interested in economics because of, in the mid 1990s, the growing interest that, a pro-life persons in the United States had with these kind of questions of international population control.
There was the 1994 Cairo Conference of the United Nations and a lot of concern for what would happen with the nations, the nations whose populations looked like they were growing too fast. And of course that was never true, but it was the scare tactic that was used at the time, and I thought this is terrible.
I was a student, I was 18, 19 years old, and smart people, trademark smart would say we have to export all of these reproductive health measures because people will not have enough to eat. And of course, as a young woman you think that’s pretty bad.
I don’t want for people to starve. And I would like for people to be able to build their families in security. And but I thought this is interesting. It. If you need to sterilize people or offer them a lot of contraception, put it in the water, whatever you have to do in order for them to have a peace and security and economic growth, then, the creator has designed a very bizarre set of circumstances in which we’re supposed to work out our lives together. So it didn’t sound right to me. It didn’t sound like it could be right, that people had to limit their families in, maybe perverse or perhaps a coercive ways. And so I really, I went to graduate school just to find out. I thought this can’t be right?
Anyway, so that was one of the reasons I didn’t even know who studied population growth and at the time. So I thought I think economics. I okay, so I went to economics. So that’s, that was really the beginning of it. And then in graduate school, I got married and I married a widower with six children.
And let’s just to put it bluntly, I thought I’m called to marriage and he had a bunch of kids that needed raising and we had more. And I took my time finishing my doctoral studies. I became a very slow student. And we worked away at it. And so finally after, my goodness, I think 12 years I did finish my degree and then, they, so these population questions were at the beginning of it, and it took me a while, but I finally finished it.
And so maybe I’ll save the intro to the book for after I, if you have a question, but I.
Simon O’Connor: No I’m just struck as a stepparent myself. I was a profound movement, I don’t know about yourself from being single to all of a sudden married with instant family. You were six. That’s quite something.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. And I wasn’t very old, so at the time, I to say that you were, but I was either 23 and I didn’t really know what I was doing. Although I’ve thought since then. If I did know what I was doing, I might not have agreed to dive in. It was such a big task. There’s something good about being young, which is you think with God all things are possible, or something like that.
You just have a lot of faith and you think if this is what we’re supposed to do, it’ll work out.
Simon O’Connor: Any case from what you were saying with your economics work that obviously you’ve got that, that rigorous economic approach, but there’s also a, clearly a strong faith perspective there. As you said earlier.
Yes. On coming out of the Cairo Conference. How could it be true if a good creator has made this world?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yes. Yeah, obviously at Cairo, there was a very clear there was a very clear distinction between people of faith of many faiths all over the world who were fighting for the defense of human life the pro-life cause that, that of course grew to be worried about international Planned Parenthood efforts. And so yeah, I think there’s a strong faith component both to my early interest in this question. As well as to like coming up to today, what research came out in this book. The basic point we’re, if I’m just going to summarize very quickly, is that the entire world isn’t having enough children and the entire world isn’t having enough children. The wealthier we get, and I would say in the United States context and certainly in Europe and you can tell me about where you are. We have a lot of we’ll say policy enthusiasts who want to say that, a few dollars here or there will make a difference. We’ll fix this if we could just get more money to families. And it’s I knew that wasn’t right. The reason it’s not because we have a 200 years of history of wealth and birth rates going in opposite directions.
The wealthier you get, the fewer children you get. If you take a cross section of time and you say look at us today, it’s like what are the chances a few bucks will make a difference? And I think the answer is, it won’t, it might on the margin, there’ll be some, somebody out there on the margin.
And so actually the. The research that I undertook was really to dig deeper into kind of what’s happening. Who is having children? Is nobody having children, or are some people having children? Of course I knew, rhetorically, I know the answer. I have kids and you have kids and so the question is who are the crazy people who still have kids and are they crazy in the kind of way?
That would be relevant for policymakers who are working on this problem. And that’s really important, right? because if you go run you survey, but me I should say this right? The history of anthropology, like the history of people traipsing around like aboriginal islands trying to figure out like what people used to do in pre-modern societies, right?
And it’s, and a lot of that’s really silly stuff. It’s really silly stuff because nobody is about to go back to a pre pre-modern society living in huts. And so it’s, so that’s a really it’s a kind of a, an example by contrast, what we really need to know is who’s having children today, who modernized?
And what does that look like? And again, are they crazy in the kind of way? We know I say crazy. Of course. I just mean they’re rare. They’re like as one book reviewer said, they’re like strange arctic explorers. You happen. He like, he found like a family in the wild. We found someone with five children.
Honestly, even four these days is becoming quite rare. So I just, I said look, let’s just go talk to these people and figure out what gives what makes them tick what are they doing? Are they people with just a really strong, like biological urge to have children? Did they have nothing better to do with their time? Were they extraordinarily wealthy? They just thought I’ve got to put a kid in every room of my house. What exactly. And of course you’re laughing because you know that none of that is the answer. And all over the country I talked with people who said this came at great personal cost.
It was a million percent worth it. We absolutely wanted to do this. And we would do it again. And it is by far and away the most meaningful and purposeful thing that we’ve been blessed with the opportunity to do. And okay, so you go how is that relevant? Is that relevant?
And so that’s the working out of the pages of this book just me trying to first of all present these stories to the reader. And for reasons that have to do with my view of how it is that we learn, I tell it in the, I tell it by stories. I think we learn through stories and we make meaning through stories.
So I tell it by stories, but of course I’m weaving together an overall narrative thread, which culminates in making the case for enlarging the role of religion in public life. And so I. That’s it. That’s the five minute summary.
Simon O’Connor: No that in itself is amazing and there’s quite a lot to, to tease out.
And in no particular order you’ve used the word ” crazy” . A few times and I assume through the research in your own life, I’ve certainly found it in my own that, general society or wider society does see large families as odd, as strange as something. Not quite fanciful, but a novelty almost.
Almost like a circus act like, wow, there’s the short person and there’s the really strong person. Oh, there’s the family. Like my sister-in-law is one of 13 kids and again, the way society, it’s amazing. Yeah. I think it’s an amazing gift in itself. But I assume from your research that.
People do literally see large families as crazy. It’s nuts. Why? Why would you do it?
Catherine Pakaluk: To put a more academic term on it a apart from crazy, we could say irrational, and this is where sort of the economist part of my training comes in. Economists spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be rational.
And economists only picked up that that mantle when philosophers stopped thinking about rationality in a sense. But we could use the language of modern economists and say departures from rationality are crazy. We could say that. We could just say it’s irrational.
And of course what it means to be irrational, kind of subhuman. It’s like we really don’t understand. I might, if I look at somebody who’s subhuman or a person that I’ve. I’ve assigned a subhuman or less than human status. I don’t relate to them as human, as a human being.
And of course, we know that this is something that human beings do. We have the capacity to relegate other human beings to that place. And it’s absolutely true that. The case for the rationality of having many children, or we’ll say an above the normal number of children, that case has to be made.
I approached my subjects with a view to believing that they had reasons for what they were doing, and I thought it would be possible to articulate those reasons. I understood, however, that those reasons may be inspired by faith. And so what I would be up against in conveying the behaviour of someone with say, 13 children to a modern secular audience is explaining how decision making informed by faith is not.
Irrational. It’s not non-rational. It’s rationality, rather informed by a different set of values. And so that was the job. Of course, the job in that sense then is to defend the rationality of women and men who make these choices and, but that’s just the first step. And then the second step is to show how this gets operationalized.
How is it that people might make these decisions, but at the same time. We would say, I know, I would say I didn’t have eight children because the Pope said so. Or some of the women that I talked to they didn’t have children because the rabbi said they should. So in other words, what is decision making inspired by faith look like?
That isn’t cult-like, or otherwise. Maybe otherwise maybe retrogressive a little bit. It’s a big job. That was a big job. Yeah. But I’m really gratified to tell you that lots and lots of people who don’t share the same values as the subjects in my book have reported that as they made their way through the book they began to understand where people are coming from.
For me that was a triumph. That was the goal.
Simon O’Connor: Just as you were saying, to tell stories. They are fundamentals. I’m a great fan of French philosopher Rene Girard, who talks about myths because those primordial events or stories which draw us together. And I’m using myth in a very particular way there.
It’s just a question on that irrationality, because, and I’m probably going to phrase this in the negative but as you say, a lot of people would look at having more than two, three children as irrational, and yet to me, having children is by its nature a rational act; we have the capacity as men and women, it’s what we are able to do. It’s generative. It’s possibly one of the more rational things. How, from your research and thought, how have we ended up with a general society that looks at one of the most rational, reasonable acts of a human being as being irrational?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. I think first of all, I think we’re profoundly social animals.
And so there’s this other thing, and of course this is certainly related to Rene Girard’s work as, as well, which is that it’s so much easier to substitute what the crowd is doing for what it is that we think we’d like to do or what it is that we think is wantable and desirable.
So that’s a big piece of this. But the other piece of this, I think requires us to go maybe a little bit deeper, if you will and tap into a little bit more sort of history and philosophy, which is that I think that as you say, we’re generative. We have the capacity to give life, to create life, mystery really.
But we, we have to choose it. And this is a, this is an awkward point. It’s an awkward point right now for a lot of reasons. I get people every day who write and they say isn’t the way to couldn’t we just go back to the good old days where people didn’t know what were like, essentially didn’t know where babies came from.
Of course, it, there’s not such a thing that people didn’t know, but, largely people, people who are very pro-natal. We’ll say, just think babies and families are great. People like us can quickly think quickly come to the conclusion that we might have been better off when we didn’t know how to …
now I think a patient and careful study of history would suggest that we’ve, in a sense, we’ve always had various diabolical means to limit family size and lots of cultures have done that. Ancient Rome exposed infants as did ancient Greece. We’ve. Dehumanize the infants of other cultures when we thought they might be a threat.
And we’re living through, of course a great attack on human life now. And the infants in the womb are not protected. In other words historically you always find you always find the possibility that children are looked at as a burden. And if children, some children, right? Like the weak children or the children of people we don’t love or don’t like, right?
Or the children who might grow up to become king and dethroned us and thinking about biblical stories. And so what this has led me to conclude is that in fact, while every person and every child ought, like in a matter of the moral ideal ought to be valued intrinsically for his or her own sake.
That what we do with children is really what we do with most things, which is we in the absence of grace and virtue, we’ll say, now we’re thinking about maybe pagan society. We’re men in the wild. We, yeah, we subject human relationships to a kind of cost benefit analysis.
Simon O’Connor: Very Utilitarian.
Catherine Pakaluk: All only, we use pe we use people, but we do use people, right? What’s happened is that okay, so first of all it’s much easier to use children than to use adults. And you can use them in lots of ways. You can have children and enjoy them for the sake of their labour or their likely contribution to your old age.
You can have them for that reason and then come to appreciate their intrinsic value later. I think that’s actually the position of most people. I don’t mean that people permanently use their children, but I don’t know. Think about your spouse for a minute. And I think when you run this thought experiment, I think most people agree like we love our spouses at the beginning, mostly selfishly, I think.
Or if we do if we do get past that, it’s very hard to know if we do, because at the beginning when we’re in love, they give us a lot of pleasure and a lot of joy. There’s no test, there’s no gosh, you’re so annoying and let me see if I really can rise above my selfishness and love you without any of that.
And that’s what I mean by selfishly. I don’t mean it in the sense that it’s bad or wrong, I just mean it in the sense that it’s motivated. I get a lot out of being with you, and of course I really think you’re great, but I also, I’m getting a lot out of this. But what happens is, like we recognise that things that we pursue for good reasons, that pursuit needs to be purified.
Like it needs to be tested. And I suspect that. In most human societies our reasons for wanting children were not pure. because our reasons for doing anything are not pure. But that over time those reasons are tested in ways that refine our care for children. I know it’s certainly true for myself, right?
That my first child, I think I loved a lot more selfishly than my last one. I think moms certainly can relate to that sort of sense. Like that first kid, you love them because you need them. You’ve never loved anything this much, but you’re just like but that last baby, I think you need them because you love them.
It’s this thing happens. Okay. It may sound like I’ve gotten very far from your question,
Simon O’Connor: No, this is really good. This is in itself quite, yeah. Quite profound. Is that my mind is whirring away here, particularly in that nature of loving someone. Yeah. But I get a sense of quite a strong theological point in the background here, which there needs to be a grace in any of these relationships, which actually transforms the relationship, but also transforms self.
Yes. If I’m hearing you correctly, children are part of that transformative grace in our lives.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yes. And then remember what I said at the beginning, like the, you said, how has this become so something we see as irrational? And what I quickly said was the trouble is you have to choose them.
All right, so now fast forward to this idea that sort of at the beginning, you want children for less than pure reasons, and then later it becomes transformed. It’s like everything else. But now suppose there’s no way you can start having children in any sort of less than pure way. In other words, you can’t fall deeply in love and because you’re in love.
You also say let’s just, we’re in love. We’ll, we’re going to have a baby. Because why? Because the decision to fall in love and get married is for all of human society now been separated from the decision about when you start your family, and that really definitively occurred. It definitively occurred with the final stage of what we call the contraceptive revolution.
It’s like the industrial revolution, right? It’s not like one thing. It’s not like one factory and machine. It’s a hundred years at least the contraceptive revolution is also close to a hundred years. You have the vulcanization of rubber. In the late, in the 1840s, and then eventually you have latex, the 1920s, and then finally you have hormonal birth control and even that gets better. This is a hundred year period of time during which time we moved from being the kind of people who when you fell in love and you really wanted to couple up, you got married. Why? Because when you couple up, oftentimes children come and so marriage is where we should have those children.
To being the kind of people who when we fall in love and couple up, we just get married and we get married as sterile men and women, the default position to begin a family is sterilized because we can reverse it. And so what happens then is you have two separate decisions. You don’t have the decision just to fall in love and get married.
Because then it will bring about, again, these children with less than pure motives like you think, baby, that’d be great. It’s a big package. It’s marriage and children first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby and the baby carriage. That is fundamentally not a description of reality anymore.
So first comes love, then comes marriage. And then when you decided the right couple, haven’t we?
Simon O’Connor: Completely decoupled it.
Catherine Pakaluk: It took a hundred years. And so what that means is now you decide to have that first baby when it’s the right time to have a baby. And when it’s the right time as it, it’s subject, now we’ve qualified the decision to have the baby. Once you’ve qualified it you’ve put conditions on it. Is it, do we have enough money? Is the house big enough? Is my job secure enough? Have I achieved enough things? Have I traveled enough? All of those things. And we know that as societies get wealthier, those qualifications become bigger and heavier.
It’s never the right time until quite a late period of time. Another way to put it is
Simon O’Connor: We’ve definitely seen that in Yeah. New Zealand. We see it across the western world. And it’s sending my anecdotal reflections to see people that there’s never a right time. And then paradoxically, it gets too late and we have to do IVF and all sorts of fertility treatments, which are usually sponsored by the government.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, that’s right. Listen, a lot of people, if they accidentally have a baby young, they go, you know what, I didn’t really mean this, but this is the best accident that ever happened to me.
We know that’s a persistent thing that happens to people, but people don’t accidentally have children anymore. First of all, and I’m not saying it would be great if they did. But what we’ve done is we’ve taken a thing that has, for most people, a very strong drive, which is to couple up, and we’ve asked children to wait for us to have a very strong drive to have that child, but that doesn’t come because nature didn’t give it to us.
Nature just didn’t give it to us.
Simon O’Connor: It’s actually a very conscious set of decisions ultimately. But I assume part of it’s, we mentioned the Cairo conference earlier. We’ve had a long history, relatively speaking of a messaging of not to have children or don’t have many children, or they’re expensive, they’re stressful, they’ll harm your marriage, et cetera, et cetera.
There’s a, yeah, a strong narrative out there that children are a burden. That you can’t financially afford them, which I have to say I found the opposite. In a strange way, there’s a great gift having this.
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s right. Yes. And you speak to the reason why I’m not particularly depressed about this question.
Why am I not particularly depressed about it? Because of course, sure. The global numbers look terrible, but actually, you point out exactly what I think is true, which is that what ultimately took place is first of all a technological revolution, which decoupled marriage from childbearing in a way that has been devastating to the decision to have children.
But what it did do is it attenuated the importance of how much value people place on having children. And here’s why I’m optimistic. If you can just make the case for the value people get on board. Yeah, because they’ve been fed for 40 years, the idea that children are going to ruin your life and if they won’t ruin your life, they will certainly ruin the planet.
Or they will certainly ruin all of the UN sustainability goals. And so it’s like a triple double, sorry, double whammy, which is you’ve got this technological change which separates these things. So the thing which we’re programmed by nature to do, which is to mate, does not anymore bring about a family except by intention. And then the values are off.
Simon O’Connor: And so again, I’m probably stretching too far here, but when I see in the Western particular the stresses, the anxiety, the lack of resilience, the depression the greater use of medical scripts for antidepressants and so forth. I’m not saying it’s all linked back to this alone, and, but we have decoupled to use that word, I said not only from that generativity that value and virtue driven activity. I just can’t help but think there’s a, there’s probably some sort of connection that there’s my grand stretch.
Catherine Pakaluk: Oh, it’s, I’m very comfortable with your stretch. I wrote it, I wrote it down and I write it as a stretch too. Of course, it’s just basically, look, I wrote about, I don’t remember.
It’s about 18 chapters in there, which is just, here’s my findings. And then I’ve got about three chapters in the end when I say, look, this is not what I was after, but this is what I heard. So I’ve got two or three other things at the end of this book which were not the subject of the research, but we’re too important not to say.
And I titled those final chapters ‘Saving Our Lives and Saving Our Souls’ and these were these themes about virtue and about loneliness and anxiety. And the ways in which children by the accounts told to me. Are solving problems and saving people’s lives in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways.
And all we get, and of course all we get culturally is the other story. This is going to ruin your life. But in re in reality, so I started to hear this early in my interviews. Because why? Why did I hear it? I didn’t. I can’t stress this enough. I didn’t go out looking for these stories.
I went out and just asked people, why did you have kids? Like why did you do this? Why did you have one? And then why did you have two? And why did you keep going? And for many people, the reason they kept going they weren’t people planning to have 10 kids. The reason they kept going is because baby number two or number three in some cases, baby number one like upended their lives in such a positive way that they said, there’s no way a baby could ever be a problem. This is so good. It’s worth doing again. I. And there were very powerful stories in there. Stories of healing, of growth healing for adults, healing for children. And I thought, I have to write this down.
I have to tell this is part of the, this is part of the project, so I couldn’t agree more. I love your stretch. It’s a bookmark in a sense for another book. Another, or another project where I might ask more questions like that. But, yeah, what if the one thing we’re not doing because we think it’s not prudent or it’s not very rational to do it, is the one thing we need.
Simon O’Connor: It strikes me as the paradox or potentially the hypocrisy in modern, again, particularly western society, that the very things they say about motherhood children and family are in fact the opposite. In other words, again, children are a burden. It’ll pull you away from your travel or your husband or your wife, and it’s just going to be trouble.
And the more kids, more stress yet, for many, not all, of course, but for many. Yeah. That actually, it strengthens relationships. It creates new opportunities. It gives a sense of I argue, deeper identity. And I know you speak about this in terms of the contrast between selfishness and self sacrifice.
Yeah. And we have a modern society obsessed with self. Yet in that sacrificial element, which again is as much philosophical as theological, really brings about, again, I’m using that word, transformative change.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yes. Yes. I think that’s right. To use a silly example I’ve been thinking a lot lately about, the women’s movement. And I’m not really deeply engaged in these debates about the future of feminism, although many many of my colleagues are and are very interested in it. But I’m an observer from the outside, and I have a poster in my house from a fair that was held in the state of New York.
Okay. 20 years ago, and the fair is put on by a group called the Ladies Village Improvement Society. And it’s a great reminder that what happened largely before the 20th Century movement, women’s movement, when women, largely stayed home and had their children when their children were grown, they often threw themselves into improvement.
Not improvement for themselves, but improvement of villages and towns and neighbourhoods and schools. So this was one example, the LVIS. The Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, New York. And, but this country was dotted with these things like these. But think about the difference between I don’t know, we’ll just say like a reduced form feminism.
Maybe we could think about a good type of feminism, but like a reduced form feminism, it’s just obsessed with women doing better for themselves. Rather than women getting together as their children get older and asking, how can we together link arms to improve the village?
Simon O’Connor: I think about even my own wife and a lot of her friends, effectively it’s people she had met through, we call it Plunket here. It’s the early years care and then, schools and sports, all of those connections. But you’re right also that, when I was single, I wasn’t worried about the nature of the local schools. As soon as I got married and inherited the kids, boy, I was really interested in what was, yeah, that’s so it’s transformative in a communal sense isn’t it? It’s not just for the children and the family. It’s transformative for society as a whole.
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s right. That’s right because it trains you to be other focused and to be outward focused and to be concerned about the structures in the institutions, in society, which are for the care of the youth. In the United States at this point, I think we, the share of adults who are married with children is significantly below 50% now, which is like unheard of in history that you would have a majority of adults wandering around. They’re not even, they don’t have to take care of anybody. And yeah, like you, they’re not interested in schools, they’re not interested in neighbourhood, not interested in sidewalks, they’re not interested in, we often comment about how these amusement parks in the United States, when they when they when they were bored. They were homey little places where you had little, rides and choo choo trains and, the kids could, and they’re like nightclubs now for it’d be really places you wouldn’t want to bring your children actually. So places like Disney are catering to like single adults hooking up spending thousands of dollars for a weekend with their friends, certain places.
Simon O’Connor: Think about Lego now as much pitched towards, and by the way, that’s not picking on people who’ve used Lego. I have some sets myself, but yeah, it’s, there’s a transformation of what used to be for children now, actually it’s single adults.
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s right. That is right. Yeah. Now, we can come up with these examples. For me, like there’s, nothing’s ever got one cause, but. The thing that I’m really focusing on in this story is this is the decision and it’s a decision because of an advancement of technology.
And by the way, if we did not have the hormonal technologies be around the same time discovered enough about our biology. And this is a good thing. It’s a wonderful thing that we can know about when we’re fertile and when we’re not fertile. The Pandora’s box of having to make a decision every month.
Is this a month in which we should conceive a child, that Pandora’s box or whatever you want to call it, we’re not going to, we’re not going to go back from that. And I would want to say generally knowledge of our fertility and to see this more clearly as a choice. Not something that happens to us, right?
Like my fertility just happens to me. There’s so many great examples of the from the programming and the advertisements for pro-Choice America that, they portray it like, you might just have an unplanned pregnancy, might just, we don’t live in that world.
In fact these things don’t happen. And I, whatever I think of these various technologies, I really want to say that it’s right and good that we know. When we’re fertile and it’s right and good that we choose it, we embrace with a whole heart, so to speak the generativity of our being, that’s a good and right thing, right?
So that’s the fact. And then what do we do with that fact? What do we do with that choice? Which brings us back to the power, I would say of hearing what it is that has motivated people to welcome children and. I couldn’t have told this to you a year ago, but I can tell you now Simon.
Almost weekly messages on social media or in my email from people who’ve read this book and say, I picked it up because of this or that. I don’t know what I was going to find. But after reading it I’ve decided I’d like another child and if God will send me one, we’ll welcome another child.
And I’m hearing this all the time now. I didn’t write the book to persuade anyone to have children, and I don’t think I say anything in there designed to persuade, have a child. So what it really just is, what it really just is listening to people who have gone through that transformative process and have been able to see the value of children in a pure way, in a way that most of us can’t see it at the beginning.
And it’s like perhaps in history it was good that was intimate and private and unwritten about, but we have to write about it now because our young people don’t know about it. And generally, as you say, people see this as irrational behaviour. And I’m finding that if you just put it in front of people, this is the voice of someone who had 10 children and when she had her 10th said, how many more can I have?
What could get you to think that way? And that sounds wild. And then you just got to read her story and you go, wow, that’s crazy. That’s amazing. And then what happens is it sinks in. What I’m finding, and this is like a whole separate piece, of this project is wow. Like how, and this is why I’m so optimistic.
We just have to tell these, we have to tell these stories of our children. We have to tell this good news. It’s a kind of gospel. And yeah, so I’m really optimistic because you can wait around for governments and structures and, policies and tax credits to, they’ll come and they’ll go, and politics is ugly and it’s never really, but sharing stories is free.
Simon O’Connor: Oh I would argue it’s been the telling of stories which has actually driven humanity from day one and it, it continues to be very efficacious or effective. As a former politician, not that I was pushing this, but I can tell you that all those policies we see in the West, baby boosts and contributions and so forth they can help, but they don’t seem to be driving any change.
Because fundamentally and from what you’ve researched and written , it is about choosing based on values and I think, I don’t know if this is something you’ve come across, I certainly see it with some of the young women that I talk to – real internal tension between, if you I’m probably going to phrase this badly, Catherine, but their internal motherly nature, thinking about and wanting to have children and yet society at large, telling them motherhood is stupid. You’d be stupid to even choose to have children. I see real tension internally with these women. As they’re grappling with, in many ways what they want versus what society is telling them that they should want.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Yeah. I, you’re exactly right. I talked with a representative from a girl’s high school today, and they want me to come and give a talk for the parents in the winter months. And she said it’s, she said, it’s very difficult for me to tell you what I want you to say. She said I want you to come and I want you to help, help the parents see that you can.
You can educate your girls to want to be mothers. And then she said, we don’t wanna tell them that they have to be mothers and stay home. And we don’t want to tell them that they, and then she just tumbled into this, to this place where, and I felt so sorry for, I thought I know what you’re saying, I don’t, and where and how have we come to a place where, to describe an ideal the I would say like a kind of ideal type of the female heart. That’s like a dangerous thing to say. It’s like a like a potentially politically insensitive thing.
Simon O’Connor: We, we have this problem, I’m sure it’s in the States; our media, our mainstream media, which I would argue is quite, biased or not particularly pro-family is obsessed with what they term trad wives and I better be honest, Catherine, I don’t fully understand it. . But it seems anyone who’s in a stable marriage with children, and particularly if the female, the mother is staying at home and looking after the child as my wife did, there’s something wrong with that. They are attacking these people . Over and over again. And you’re going how have we reached this peak madness?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. No, it’s right. The discourse is crazy. This trad wife language wasn’t a word, it wasn’t a thing when I wrote this book.
So gratefully, I don’t have to use the word anywhere in the book but, young women write to me, they say I really want to know about trad wives I’ve purchased your book. And I said I don’t think most of the women in my book would describe themselves as trad. At least a third of them had full-time jobs.
Most of them, from home or in some combination. But you’re exactly right. Like we need some special label for women who, welcome children, arrange their lives to do what’s best for their children. And so I try very very hard to just describe reality without buckets or labels.
These aren’t conservatives or liberals. I, in fact, I didn’t really ask them what their political beliefs were. Some, in some cases, there’s funny moments where I tell you what I observed, but I just try to just like, are they pe, and this is where, I think we could be more like Aristotle, actually, I think natural philosophers who observe the world and try to draw conclusions.
So that was my goal. And it’s not perfect, but it was a first pass.
Simon O’Connor: I think, look, I’m a great Aristotelian or a fan. I’m a great believer that we can actually observe at the world, strangely enough, and then make conclusions from it. We, I think. philosophically, we’ve moved a long way from that now.
Yeah. And you’ve got the Foucault and others of the world who are doing all sorts of crazy back flips of thought. And look where we’ve ended up, . Look, I’m conscious of your time, Catherine, but just one thing I wanted to raise with you, you asked at the start, so New Zealand’s birth rate or fertility rate’s about 1.6.
And it’s used to be in the 1960s, about four, 4.3 I think. So we’ve certainly gone down, but there’s a demographic cliff coming for Western societies that we are just – I’m in many ways bringing up the economic approach here – we’ve definitely talked values, but in the Western world there, there’s just not a replacement of enough people. I was at a conference earlier this year called ARC, the ARC Forum in London, where demographers were saying there’s a real cliff coming for countries and not replacing, not having enough children. This is going to have massive impacts into our societies, which I don’t think many people seem to understand.
Catherine Pakaluk: I couldn’t agree more. I think people do not understand. I wrote about this a little bit in the. Preface well in the introduction parts of my book to help impress upon the reader how important it is to think about why people have children, why they would have children, why they would have more than 1.6 children, is really what I was after.
Of course, I interviewed people with a lot of children, but. I doubt that it’s very different. What gets you above 1.6 is the set of things about the value beliefs, about the value of children. You are exactly right. Mostly I would say I, don’t know your political situation.
Speaking for my country. We are absolutely fiscally bankrupt. We will not be able to pay for the programs we’ve come to think are part of the good society. And I’m not making a case for or against those programs, but we simply won’t be able to afford them. And then beyond that sort of economic cliff for the fiscal cliff that I think we’re facing, social security, which is like our biggest, since our most program.
We will not be able to continue making payments in the way that we do now by, at least by in the under 10 years from now, which is like a blink of an eye. And then we get around to the Medicare and Medicaid and all of those other things. So people haven’t thought about that, or if they have, they just feel politically that, in a democratic society, you just have to pass the football to the next and hope that you’re not the one holding the football when the piggy bank runs out. I think, more soberly, it’s not merely about our fiscal health, there is political instability.
Those when people feel that there aren’t enough of their own kind. And we’re seeing this kind of growing nationalism all around the world. And I think that’s disturbing, alarming. And I think it’s in part driven by the fact that people, now they’ve done the math, they realize like at the present rate, there won’t be any more South Koreans, right?
There are countries like South Korea are in much worse shape. New Zealand, though it’s not pretty. So that, I think that does create potentially hyper nationalist feelings because people feel under threat. And then finally I’ll say that there’s a kind of maybe the most important thing that people haven’t thought about, which is that, as family sizes shrink like down to the sort of ones and the twos and now the ones and the zeros. What this means is all things being equal, people live in a society in which there are fewer family ties. There are fewer brothers and sisters, fewer aunts and uncles, fewer kin and what I think what some of us think is happening is, on the one hand, this begets a kind of loneliness and lack of secure identity in your family, which is where you first place your identity should be.
But then in the second place, a kind of transfer al of the place where your identity should lie from your family to say the political order or other kinds of we, we would call, we would say identity politics, like where did that come from? We’re not really we don’t really manage very well to be the, autonomous free floating molecules that we sometimes think that we are. And in fact it looks as if we find other ways to, to base our identity if we don’t have an extended network of family. Look, in my family, I’m a, I’m one of nine, thankfully, and I’ll just say it’s very clear over my lifetime that if I just had one sibling, I may have concluded a long time ago, I’m not much like my sister or my brother, and I might’ve thought I don’t have a lot in common with my family and I might’ve drifted away from my family, but over 49 years of life, at some points in time, this sister was the best friend and this one became the best friend, and this brother was my enemy. And now he’s absolutely my best friend.
And this has come and gone. And in fact having a bunch of family to choose from really maximizes the idea, maximizes the chance that you. We’ll be able to be anchored in your family and then by extension that you’ll recognise other people’s anchoring and identity in their families.
So it’s a great gift, right? And of course we all look back and we laugh. We say, remember when we were fighting? I remember when you were fighting. But I think what would it be like to have just one sibling and to grow apart? And of course that’s a role. Sad reality for many people. Yeah, economic, political, and I would say human consequences of what these lower birth rates look like.
Now I don’t think there’s a quick fix, but I do think I do think that, sharing news about the value of children can make a big difference.
Simon O’Connor: And I think that’s why your book is a great gift. And as we said a few times now it’s that there’s power in sharing stories .
That good news as you said the Bible is all about stories and look how that’s transformed the world. And so the books that we write, in your case, you’ve written, I haven’t written a book yet – it is powerful. And so Hannah’s children, that was 55 women, wasn’t it, that you spoke and shared their stories, which in itself is powerful.
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s right. And I’ll, maybe I’ll anticipate your question or maybe I won’t, but the question you did is that this material has been so interesting to so many people in ways that I did not anticipate. Of course you hope, you hope it will be.
I thought it was tremendously interesting and inspiring and edifying. But it’s been such a such an eye-opening set of stories for people to read that. I’m going to go back and talk to fathers of families and try to do the same thing. Try to honor their stories and tell them in a way that’s say interesting and compelling and as close as possible to the heart of the man if I could be so bold as to try to do that.
So that, we’ll see. That’s my next project.
Simon O’Connor: Oh, I think it, look it’s wonderful and I’m very conscious of your time and Catherine, I’m just so grateful that you’ve accepted this offer. I know you will be bombarded with emails, let alone some colonial from New Zealand.
Asking to, to chat I think amazing. It’s wonderful. I certainly encourage viewers and listeners to find Catherine’s book again. It’s called ‘Hannah’s Children. The Woman Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth’. But if people also want to connect into your wider work and research, you’ll have a website, I assume?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah it’s just my last name, pakaluk.com . It’s not terribly effective. I started out with really nothing, nothing like a web presence, I’m hopefully in the next couple of months going to improve that that setup a little bit. I’m on X and so probably for people who follow the intellectual discussions on X, I’m not like as engaged as I could be, but I’m not absent, so you can find me there. And then then I have an email address, which I try to keep up with as much as possible.
Simon O’Connor: Oh, it’s. It’s a madness these days. But then again, that’s what I found with a large family, is you can allocate out tasks. This is where more kids help as well, right? You’re on the cooking, you’re on the cleaning. Could you go and look after the young one? Thank you. I’ve got to do all my emails. .
Catherine Pakaluk: Simon before you let me go, my 8-year-old son, I told him that it was the daytime where you are and he said, ask him what time it is where he is because you know it’s 9:00 PM now our time, for the 8-year-old, what time is it where you are?
Simon O’Connor: It’s 1:00 PM – it’s one o’clock in the afternoon here in New Zealand. I will also admit if your 8-year-old gets to see this, that behind me is a fake background. The reality is it’s winter time. It’s winter time here in New Zealand, and those primarily watching and listening this will know that it’s been bucketing down with rain outside, and I’m looking out my window at the moment. You can tell the 8-year-old it’s raining, it’s grey and glummy.
But come in the summertime!
Catherine Pakaluk: That’s great. That’s wonderful. It, this is, one of the, one of the good things of the internet is that we can have this conversation relatively unimpeded.
So thank you for having me. I’m very happy to meet you and hopefully in person someday.
Simon O’Connor: I would look forward to that. And look, thank you for taking up the invitation and thank you for sharing those women’s stories and through the power of these stories reaffirming just what is the great grace of having children. So Catherine, thanks for being on the show.
Catherine Pakaluk: You’re welcome.
