A PhD and Eight Kids? These Families Defy the Birth Rate Decline

Women who buck the trend reveal our intrinsic motives and subjective values.

Birthrates around the world are plummeting. In the United States, birthrates have declined from an average of almost four births per woman in the 1960s, to 1.7 births on average per woman in 2024. The vast majority of countries in the world have birth rates below replacement level (China – 1.2, S. Korea – .8, Italy – 1.2, Jamaica – 1.3, etc.). There is not a single country in the world whose birthrate is trending up. Secularization certainly drives much of this trend, but even religious communities have seen steady declines in their fertility rates. Significant economic forces and technological developments are at work. But subjective value can more than offset these forces.

Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth explores the phenomenon of plunging birthrates around the world by examining the intentions, motives, and desires of outliers to this trend: educated women in the United States with five or more children. The author, Catherine Pakaluk, is herself an outlier, having completed a PhD in economics at Harvard University and holding an academic position at the Catholic University of America while also having eight children.

After laying out many of the demographic trends across countries mentioned above, Pakaluk turns to the stories of women she and her co-investigators interviewed – fifty-five interviewees total. She finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that these women have quite different beliefs and desires than women who have fewer or no children.

Before delving into the psychology and values expressed by these women (in surprisingly similar ways it turns out), we should take a moment to lay out the basic economic logic behind declining birth rates. There are at least three economic forces at play: declining material advantages from having children, increasing (monetary) costliness of raising children, and most importantly, rapidly rising opportunity costs of having children – especially for women. All of these took place in a world where the literal cost of avoiding conception plummeted due to new contraception technologies.

For much of human history, children were an asset to the family. In farming communities, children at young ages could begin contributing to household or farm work. In a world with relatively little trade, the family had to engage in far more activities that they do today – raising animals and crops, hand-washing clothes, sewing and mending clothes, creating thread, creating, repairing, and maintaining tools and buildings, etc. There was a huge amount of work to be done and more hands not only lightened the load, they also created opportunities for small-scale division of labor and greater specialization within the household. 

But modern wealthy countries are enmeshed in a complex web of trade that leads people to specialize and outsource most forms of production (clothes, food, housing, transportation, toolmaking). We also tend to have restrictive labor laws for minors while also heavily subsidizing education. Therefore, children in these countries rarely make substantial contributions to the material wellbeing of their families. Combine that with increasingly large and extensive old-age entitlement programs that leave elderly parents much less reliant on direct support from children, and the material value of children diminishes to insignificance.

At the same time, as children became less important as producers in a family, they became more important as consumers themselves and in the “consumption” of their parents. The cultural expectations of what parents ought to spend on their children to maintain external status or to feel good about their parenting, rises dramatically as families become wealthier. From clothes to sports to music lessons to vacations to dental and orthodontic work, it has become possible to spend increasing amounts of money on one’s children to “keep up with the Jones’ (kids).”

Even as the monetary benefits of children declined to negligibility and the monetary costs associated with children grew rapidly, a third phenomenon took place. The opportunity cost of having children rose dramatically and relentlessly, especially for women. A simple example illustrates this point. Suppose at an initial point in time, manufacturers could produce either one ship or ten cars. In that moment, every ship manufacturers choose to build means they are not producing ten cars. That’s the opportunity cost of building a ship.

Now suppose that advances in technology make it possible for manufacturers to produce one ship or twenty cars. The opportunity cost of producing a ship in terms of cars has doubled. Holding everything else constant, we would expect manufacturers to shift their production, on the margin, to producing more cars. I recognize that under certain conditions the income effect might outweigh the substitution effect, but for the sake of the analogy assume that the market value of cars and ships does not change meaningfully. Suppose technology further advances so manufacturers can build one ship or one hundred cars. The opportunity cost of building ships in terms of foregone cars has exploded.

In most scenarios, these technological changes will lead to fewer ships being manufactured, with the critical caveat earlier that the market value of ships and cars is not changing. But let’s relax that assumption and return to Pakaluk’s study of the outliers, of women who choose to have large numbers of children, despite giving up the equivalent of a hundred times what women a few centuries ago gave up in terms of career or consumption opportunities.

Why has that small subset of women, roughly 5 percent of mothers, not followed the trend of declining fertility? I think it is because they see the “ship” as a massive ocean liner in terms of value and the increased opportunities given up as the equivalent of matchbox cars. Even a tenfold increase in the opportunity cost of producing an ocean liner in terms of matchbox cars is unlikely to affect one’s behavior much. But notice that for this to hold true, we must focus entirely on subjective psychic value, because the value of children (or the ships) in material terms has declined dramatically.

The women Pakaluk surveys almost universally express an extremely high regard for, and valuation of, their children. But unlike the high-income families that seem to value their children highly in terms of spending money on them, the women interviewed valued their children in and of themselves. They did not think they could add value by “investing” heavily in their children, in ways Gary Becker’s model of children as durable goods might suggest.

This is significant because it explains the huge disparities in how many children women from the sample had versus most other women. They did not need to have extensive financial resources to maintain their children because they rarely felt the need for expensive investments in classes, camps, cars, or vacations – those expenses added little for women who valued their children, as Pakaluk sees it, intrinsically. Such an approach also means the marginal cost of additional children is far lower. This is apparent in the discontinuity between how many children most women have and how many children these outlier women have. We are not talking about a marginal shift from two or three children versus four or five. We’re often talking about the difference between having two or three children and having eight, nine, or ten or more children.

Hannah’s Children reminds me of one of Bryan Caplan’s books: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. In a parallel approach, Caplan dove into a huge variety of survey data regarding having children. He found, in very clear terms, that people overestimate the initial cost and inconvenience of children and underestimate how much they will value their children when they are older. It’s a remarkable phenomenon, born out in the stories of Hannah’s Children, that the number of people who regret having children or who wished they had had fewer children is vanishingly small.

This leads to perhaps a fourth factor contributing to declining birthrates: attenuated connection to the elderly. Most people do not have Caplan’s determination, statistical abilities, or love of survey data to discover the long-term value of children for themselves. Religion and tradition, especially in extended family contexts, served as an important vehicle for conveying the intangible future value of children that would provide greater encouragement for young couples to have children earlier and more frequently. As families spread out geographically and as elderly grandparents increasingly moved to retirement communities and nursing homes rather than the homes of their children or grandchildren, this contact between the young and the old diminished; and with it stories from the elderly about how wonderful children are throughout one’s lifetime were communicated less often.

Although religious belief seems to be a necessary condition (the one exception among her fifty-five cited cases seems to prove the rule), Pakaluk emphasizes that religion is far from sufficient. Average fertility in basically every religious group has seen similar declines to the non-religious. Even Utah’s birthrate has dropped below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. The women in this study are truly outliers based upon how they value children. Far less important was how wealthy they were, how large of a family they grew up in, or being religious. 

Pakaluk’s findings suggest that government programs to increase birthrates will not have much of an impact because they do not change women’s demand for children, only the quantity demanded. It only changes the price – which leads to small increases on the margin when the demand curve is small and inelastic. Such policies will not create the step-change politicians want to achieve. 

Changing women’s demand for children requires something else; a subtle but critical shift in how we value children altogether. Tastes, preferences, beliefs, these matter most when it comes to having many children. For the women Pakaluk surveyed, dollars and cents were only a drop in the bucket of their decision to have children.



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