Researcher says stories of large families are a type of gospel

Former New Zealand MP Simon O’Connor interviewed Dr Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children – The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Death, on the Family Matters podcast on July 9.

Dr Pakaluk, who is an associate professor, an economist and social philosopher at the Catholic University of America, is a mother of eight and a grandmother of 33. She married a widower who had six children.

Her book has been described as a “compelling case for having a large family in a modern context of adult autonomy and hyper individualism. [It is] informed by a multidisciplinary study canvassing economics, history, sociology and philosophy”.

Harvard-educated Dr Pakaluk said by telling the stories of people who are having children she is “weaving together an overall narrative thread, which culminates in making the case for enlarging the role of religion in public life”.

Having children is not non-rational, she said. “It’s rationality, rather, informed by a different set of values.”

There has been a technological revolution, she added, 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 attenuate the importance of how much value people place on having children.”

People who have had larger families, though, found that having a child “upended their lives in such a positive way that they said, there’s no way a baby could ever be a problem”. So they had more children.

Dr Pakaluk said she didn’t write the book to persuade anyone to have children, “and I don’t think I say anything in there designed to persuade, [to] have a child”.

But she thought it was important to listen to people having children and to tell their stories of giving life.

“We have to tell these stories of our children. We have to tell this good news. It’s a kind of gospel.”

She also lamented the loss of family ties that comes with fewer people having fewer children.

“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,” she said.

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Dr Catherine Pakaluk on the joys of large families (Family Matters)