I recently listened a book called Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk, and quite enjoyed it. The author's purpose was to explore the reasons why some small number of women (about 5% of the child-bearing population) choose to have a larger than average number of children. This is especially relevant as the low birth rate around the world gets more and more attention. Governments all over the world are wondering how to increase the birth rate and are exploring all kinds of incentives. South Korea's birth rate is at an astonishing .748 births per woman in 2024. The birth rate for the United States last year was less than 1.6 births per woman, a new low.
Pakaluk's research was done jointly with a BYU professor who has 7 children. Pakaluk is an economics professor at Catholic University and has 8 children herself in addition to raising the 6 children her husband had when they married after his first wife died. They conducted 55 interviews with women who had five of more children. The book has long quotes from the interviews. Some reviews on Good Reads complained about the long quotes which included all the "ums" and "you knows" of ordinary speech. Personally I enjoyed them. It felt like I was present at the interviews getting to know some delightful women. The audio book version was well-done with the voice actor doing a good job portraying many different voices.
The book was named after the Hannah of the Bible who was infertile and prayed to have a son. She was blessed to have Samuel and then went on to have 5 more children.
Summary
The women interviewed were all college-educated and lived in the United States in various locations. The women were still of child-bearing age and were of varying race and ethnicity. Some were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as I am while others were Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. I don't think any Muslims were included. She changed all the names of the women so they wouldn't be recognized.
The mothers of the book all had different stories. The book starts out with an interview with a woman she calls Hannah. Hannah is Jewish but raised in a secular family. She went on a spiritual journey to Israel where she met her husband who was there for similar reasons. She now has 7 children but may have more. She says that she is not the planner of all plans. God is that planner for her.
Like Hannah, most of the women had large families for religious reasons but not because they felt compelled to and not because they didn't feel they had a choice or felt oppressed. Ultimately they had more children because they valued those children more than anything else in their lives--more than their careers, money, free time, fancy vacations or cars. Only one women interviewed did not cite religious reasons--she was Jewish and was married to a very financially successful man who really wanted a lot of children. She said she would have stopped with 3 kids but he wanted more so he convinced her to have 5 with potentially more in the future. That was a funny interview.
Many of the women felt that their children were thriving MORE because they were members of a large family. The children learned responsibility, selflessness, and fulfillment through being part of a family team. While our culture tends to believe that smaller families produce higher-quality children, the stories of the children in this book oppose that viewpoint. This book suggests that the isolation many children experience as an only child or one of two, contributes to the anxiety and depression that are such a problem today. Pakaluk asked the question, "What effect do babies have on the well-being of children and adults?" Over 20 percent of her subjects said that children had been healing in their lives.
My main impression of the book is that the women acknowledged that there are definitely challenges to having large families but there is also a lot of joy with each additional child. "With more kids, there were more people to share the joy." (p. 149) Many of the women wished they had started sooner but, until you have a child, you don't know what it's going to be like. Many of the women were a little sad to be reaching the end of their child-bearing years despite having a large number of children.
My only criticism of the book was that the author neglected to discuss a major issue many women experience which is the challenges of pregnancy. My pregnancies were not difficult which definitely made it easier to have 9 children, but I know many women who get quite sick with their pregnancies. Not a single woman in her interviews appear to have even mentioned it which seems a little surprising. I'm sure women who get quite sick are much less likely to have 5+ children but it seems like a few might have had that struggle. One woman had significant health problems with a few of her pregnancies but that was definitely not the norm.
All in all, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone. Here is an interview with the author that I also enjoyed: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/04/94760/
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