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They Will Replace You: What Drives Them? (With Catherine Pakaluk of Hannah's Children)
Join us in an inspiring conversation with Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a professor of economics at Catholic University, and author of 'Hannah's Children'. Catherine, a mother of 14 (8 biological and 6 adopted), shares her experiences of motherhood, the purposefulness behind having many children, and insights from her qualitative research on mothers with large families. We discuss the controversy surrounding the book, factors influencing high fertility rates, and the cultural and policy implications of promoting intentional childbearing. Catherine also provides practical advice on parenting, gender roles in large families, and the surprising joys and challenges of raising many children.
[00:00:00]
Simone Collins: Hello everyone. We are so excited to be joined today by one of my favorite people in the entire world and inspiration to me. Catherine Ruth. She is a teacher.
She's a professor of economics at Catholic University, but more importantly to me, she's author of Hannah's Children, the book that changed my mind from wanting seven kids to 10 plus kids. It got me so excited about it. So we're thrilled. We're thrilled to have you on and we're very keen. to ask you some questions, both about the book, but also about being a super mother.
I mean, you've had, you're the mother to 14 children, eight of them that you've given birth to. It's just insane, like, that you're living this, this dream. Just to clarify, you have
Malcolm Collins: 14 children. But that gives you a lot of data points.
Catherine Pakaluk: That is true.
Simone Collins: So the first thing we were curious as we were prepping for our conversation with you and just wondering is when you published Hannah's Children, which is a book in which [00:01:00] you really share academic research where you did qualitative interviews with.
Mothers who had more than five Children or five or more Children, I should say. When you released the book or even when you were doing the research what was the most controversial thing that came up or the place where you got the most pushback or bristling?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, probably. If you want to know the truth, probably the fact that I limited my sample that college educated women.
Yeah,
it's just interesting because a lot of people wanted to you know, number one, you know, are you sort of saying that the only way to be like a full human being is to have a college education, which is funny because I'm like on the other end of this I I'd be. More inclined to say, like, we've done too much college in this country, and we need to kind of free up the education market, free up the credentialing market.
But so that was something that came up a lot as a kind of pushback was like, you know, you're, you're, you're zeroing in on sort of this a special group of people, right? Because it's not, it's not everybody. Why did you
Malcolm Collins: choose College Educated Women?
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, well, I did, because that's where in the data, we really see [00:02:00] this the, the, the correlation most strongly, right?
So the more education people, women and countries have, the fewer children they have. So you see what I mean? So you kind of want to figure
Simone Collins: out this post globalization, post female empowerment world. You're totally right. It's one of the things we were just recording an episode about. was how we can't go back, how researchers have found that, for example, giving men more economic empowerment relative to women actually doesn't increase marriage rates.
You know, so like, yeah, no, okay. That makes sense. Now I get it.
Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. That was the reason. And of course I wrote the book really for a general audience, a very wide audience. And so I didn't
Published on 9 months, 1 week ago