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Why Children Became Useless: Faith and the Future of the Family | Catherine Ruth Pakaluk | October 2025
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This forum address, entitled why Children Became Useless Faith in the Future of the Family, was given on October 28th of 2025 by Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, then faculty at the Bush School of Business in Catholic University and founder of the Political Economy Academic Area.
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Thank you so much for such a warm welcome. I'm so happy to be here among so many friends, old friends at that do children just happen because we are animals and nature urges us to reproduce? That's what most people seem to think, if they've thought about it at all. But if that is so, just how many children does nature urge us to have and why are birth rates so low and going lower? Children and families are disappearing from the landscape of American households. The share of non family households has more than doubled since the 1960s. 60% of American households are now childless, meaning no child under 18 resides there. Fewer than 10% of households have a baby or a toddler. 2024 marked the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in the United States. 1.59 expected births per woman. This number is not explained by Covid or the financial crisis. It's the culmination of a century long implosion. About two children per woman is required for population to replace itself. The United States has generally been below that number since 1971. The population of the world is also collapsing. Single child families 1 and Dones are the most common type of Canadian family with children at one birth per woman, a population halves in one generation. The total number of kids worldwide has already stopped growing and the total number of people in the world will peak soon in 25 or 30 years. Birth rates this low defy the assumption that we are urged by nature to reproduce. Experts already project that the global fertility rate is below replacement and nobody seems to know just how low births can go. South Korea takes the prize at the world's lowest with a total fertility rate of 0.75. Taiwan is just below 1. Japan is hovering just above 1. Our southern neighbor Mexico comes in below the United States at 1.45, England 1.4, Greece 1.2, Spain and Poland 1.1. Low and falling fertility spells big trouble. Fewer workers means economic stagnation. Sagging government revenues means political tension over what to spend and as people sense erosion of their own people and place populism and nationalism seem to rise. There are human losses, too. Fewer siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. An accidental isolation that will give rise to more loneliness, anxiety, and individualism. The anxious generation may be more than just a matter of screens. So against this backdrop, everyone everywhere is asking a single why aren't people having kids? The trouble is, it's the wrong question. It's always been the wrong question. People seem to believe children just happen because we're animals and nature urges us to reproduce. They believe marriage and childbearing are like in us as they are to the animals and biological processes and deterministic behaviors. On the contrary, we are made in the image of God, male and female. He created them. So marriage and childbearing belong to the domain of the spiritthe rational part of the rational animal. Marriage and kids are choices we make. They have to be chosen because we are reasoning beings. The reasons to do them have to be weightier than the reasons not to do them. And there are many reasons not to do them. Marriage and kids are hard to do. You give up a lot, but what do you gain? Birth rates are really falling because most people can't answer that question. The right question to ask is why do people have kids? The answer is that they have kids for the same reason. They do anything else. They need to or they want to. So a neat historical illustration will help to make this point. The Ford Motor Company introduced the Model T in 1908. Cars had city uses, farm uses, and uses for everything in between. Henry Ford's automobile was a great success. More than 15 million Model Ts were sold before it was replaced by the model A in 1927. But there was a casualty. The horse. Model T's eroded demand for these animals all across America. Now cars offered several advantages over horses speed and endurance. Cars were much faster and didn't tire out. The Ford Model T topped out around 45 miles per hour while a horse gallops at half that speed. For a short burst of time only. Reliability and weather. Horses were vulnerable to illness, injury, exhaustion and extreme weather. Mud, snow, heat. Cars could operate in more conditions and without giving up capacity and versatility. Cars could carry more cargo and passengers efficiently. No need to stable a car, you just park it, saving time and space maintenance. Horses required constant upkeep, feeding, grooming, shoeing and vet care. Fuel was a cost, but it beat the labor intensive care of a living animal. Cars slashed these costs. Sanitation and urban living horses produced massive waste. 15 to 35 pounds of manure and a gallon of urine every day for horse cities Like London and Chicago around 1900 were clogged with filth, flies and disease. Cars improved public health and made urban expansion cleaner and more feasible. And finally, land use. Horses required vast amounts of pasture for grazing, 2 to 5 acres per horse, while cars needed just roads and fuel stations. So millions of acres once dedicated to horse feed shifted to other uses. The bottom line is that cars met a need for transportation and movement better than horses. So the population of horses peaked in the United States in 1910. It took only two years of Model Ts for Americans to begin substituting away from horses at scale. By 1912, cars already outnumbered horses in New York city. And by 1917, there were no more horses in New York City. Now American culture was revolutionized by the car. Culture evolved to embody this new form of needs meeting. An example of what a Polish anthropologist by the name of Bronislaw Malinowski called functional theory. He said, any theory of culture has to start from the organic needs of man, and if it succeeds in relating the fully imperative needs we call spiritual or economic or social, it will supply us with a set of general laws such as we need in a sound scientific theory. So horse culture gave way to car culture broadly and definitively. There's no going back without eliminating the car. People argue sometimes about whether politics is downstream from culture or culture from politics. Malinowski would reject both formulations. Culture is downstream from function, he would have said. He wrote, we have to approach the concept of function through the concepts of use or utility and relationship in all activities. We find that the use of an object leads human beings to the satisfaction of some need. So horses gave way to cars because of a profound alteration in needs meeting. And culture soon reflected the change to complete the illustration. Horse ownership today is derived from the few uses that horses have left. We'll call them horses of need and from the value that horses provide to the rare people who really love horses, the horses of want. So there's no puzzle of falling horse ownership. If you saw an article like that, you'd scratch your head. You'd ask yourself, but why would anyone have a horse? People have horses for the same reason they do anything else they need to or they want to. As the need for horses collapsed, horses were sidelined in culture. Those who still want horses for merely personal reasons have to put up with a society that doesn't prioritize horses, isn't organized for horses, and finds little reason to make accommodation for mere personal preferences. Now children have gone the way of horses. The reason birth rates are really falling Is because no one needs a kid and fewer and fewer people want one. Like horses, children have suffered an economic wound. They've been replaced by other, easier, cheaper or better ways to meet organic human needs. So the reasons to have a kid, the gains for most people don't outweigh those hefty personal costs. Historically, children met three big first, the need for help and labor. Children were replaced by machines, by economic growth more generally. Before, when people were poor, surviving children helped increase the comfort and prosperity of the household, from domestic chores to family income and companionship. Second, children met the need for old age support. Children were replaced by social insurance programs, Social Security in the United States, the first such program was established in Germany in 1889. Denmark and New Zealand followed in the 1890s, Australia and Sweden in the early 1900s, England in 1908 and the United States in 1935. Third, children met the need for sexual union. So a child laden sexuality was replaced by child free sexual unions. Before the widespread use of birth control, sexual union needed at least a few children. Kids were the price of sex. If you wanted one, you needed the other. And so the rise of various forms of birth control obliterated that necessity. And with that, the need for marriage too. So rates of marriage fall right along with the fertility rate. Marriage is needed if kids come from sexual unions and if children are needed. Children, in a sense are the engine of marriage, the horse to the carriage. In sum, the need for children collapsed just as the need for horses collapsed. Children are useless for the household. So child culture has given way to cultures surrounding this new form of needs meeting machine culture, government dependency culture and a child free sex culture. Having children today is derived from the one need that children still meet. The need to be a parent. We'll call them children of need and from those rare families who value children so much. Children of want. So there's no puzzle of falling birth rates. People have children for the same reason. They do anything else. They need to or they want to. The need for children collapsed and kids are now sidelined in culture. Those who still want children in society have to put up with this. Society that doesn't prioritize children, isn't organized for children and finds little reason to make accommodations for kids. If all this sounds rudely utilitarian, it is, but it shouldn't distress us. There are lower motives and higher motives for doing anything good. We go to work at first for lower motives. To have money, to support ourselves because we need to. But the higher motive that work is good in itself and gives Glory to God. When we tend to learn through working and first for more selfish reasons. With children, the lower motives, raw needs have mostly been eroded. If you want a child for your own sake today, to be a parent, that's higher, but still consumerist and self centered. The highest motive is to want a child for the child's own sake. Usually this type of motive is nourished by a living religious tradition. And as a matter of empirical fact, in the modern world only that highest motive tends to bring about above replacement fertility. Because if every child is a unique, unrepeatable blessing with a destiny only he or she can fulfill, well, there's no limit to how many you could want. On the other hand, if it's just being a parent, that you're after one and done does the trick. So Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich assumed that people breed like animals, that children just happen. They supposed that family sizes are not the result of human decision making, but of a simple biological relationship. Resources in, children out. They believed that births could be expected, that natality is an instinct, a default for humanity. So lower birth rates would require external pressures. Incentives nudges downward policy force. Natality imposes social costs, they would say, like pollution, and requires some kind of solution. Take away resources and people will have fewer children. This was literally the eugenics playbook. The consequences of those policies are too horrible to catalog here. Since those policymakers could not take away the desire for children in the hearts of people who wanted them, they took the children by force. But some pro family advocates today adopt the same faulty position. They assume that people naturally want to marry and have children, that family sizes are not the result of human decision making, but of a simple biological relationship. Resources in, children out. They believe that births can be expected, that natality is an instinct, and so low birth rates that we see around us must result from malevolent low wages, high housing costs, downward policy force. Natality, they would say, is a positive externality, like education, and it calls for some kind of solution. The prescriptions that you see for nudging up the birth rate seem to share a fatal flaw with the Malthusians of the past. Give people more resources, people will have more children. But since they cannot put the desire for children in the hearts of those who don't want them, these policies fail time and time again. Both sides of that Malthusian position take births for granted, but hardly anything in human experience suggests that we should do that. For one thing, birth rate decline is global. Countries with generous social benefits and countries without Western values. And countries without higher levels of female education and lower higher ages of marriage and lower. A sober look at birth rates suggests that not wanting children is the baseline. Second, people have never been richer or freer to choose their family size. To suppose that natality is the default is to suppose that the wealthiest, freest people the world has ever known have been able to choose all wanted things except children. It makes more sense to say that not having kids is what all these free and wealthy people want, especially in light of the fact that family sizes show considerable variation. It's possible to have more, but most people don't. Third, direct incentives don't work to boost fertility. Hungary has spent 5% of its gross domestic product since 2010, and the 2024 fertility rate was a paltry 1.38. If people were interested in having children but merely constrained, resource nudges would work. Or they would work on some segments of the population, but they don't. Fourth, US birth rates have been falling for more than 200 years, diving below replacement only with the advent of the birth control pill in 1960. This was the final blow to the children of need. People were very eager to adopt hormonal contraception as the norm for their marriages and almost simultaneously as the norm for premarital relations. Ideal family sizes plummeted in the decade after the pill as women and families became keen on new opportunities opened up for them. The birth rate declined in the 1960s. Was families just wanting fewer children so the default? Natalists seem to have it wrong. Given sufficient wealth, wherever people can get their hands on means to prevent conceptions, they seem to do so. Adopting the notion that people fundamentally want to have children forces us into a nonsense position that the wealthiest, freest, most reproductively enabled people in history have not been able to act on their biological inclination to have children. It is vastly more sensible to conclude that having children is an act and a habit for individuals and societies, a distinct form of human excellence or virtue governed by the classical account of human action. If people aren't having many kids today, it's because they don't see a reason to do it. When it comes to the future of children, assessing the reasons to have them is our most urgent task. The children of need are trending to one and done. So who are the children of want and why are they wanted? This insight led me on a journey to meet the 5% of women around the country whose family sizes defy low birth rates and number and kind. In number, they had five, six, seven or more children, as many as 15 in kind like the biblical Hannah. They took childbearing to be the purpose of their lives and the meaning of their marriages. They quietly arranged their affairs to welcome new life. They fit their passions, interests and professions around children. Rather than fitting children around those things. Childbearing was a way of life for them and not a mere season of life. So Esther, a Jewish mother of nine children, told me, you know, my understanding is that all blessings come from God. And the three big blessings we talk about in Judaism, our children who bring us pride and joy and follow us in tradition, good health and financial sustenance. I don't feel, she said, like you could ever have too much of any of those things. These are blessings. They're God's expressions of goodness. We can put up roadblocks not to get the blessings, but those are the blessings. She finished, sometimes we need to ask God to make ourselves proper vessels to receive the blessings. But those are the biggest blessings. The women I met wanted kids so much because they believed children are blessings from God, expressions of divine goodness and the purpose of their marriages. They believe children are like health and wealth. You can't have too much of any of those things. No one and done for them, all things being equal, they would always choose another child. So Leah, an accomplished musician, told me, if anything, children are light. Every child brings a divine gift into the world that nobody else can bring. Nobody else can do what that person is here to do. And yes, it takes so much self sacrifice, but ultimately I feel like my husband and I are really happy. We are really, really happy and fulfilled, even though we've had to work really, really hard to the breaking point at times. Her fifth was due just weeks after our interview, and she confessed, I. I've had to sacrifice some of my own interests and pursuits at this time. I don't think they're on hold forever. I think as a mother of a large family, you have to understand sometimes things are on a back burner. It doesn't mean the burner is off. It means you're rotating priorities as needed. And I've done a lot of that. She continued, after having the third and the fourth, there are identity challenges. It's not as easy to pursue personal dreams and pursuits as it once was. It's a sacrifice that I've made because I value having a large family and I value every child as a gift. But I wouldn't be honest if I said it wasn't a struggle. And I think that part of your identity just evolves into motherhood being a big tenet of who you are and what you're giving to the world like a shift. And it's almost radical and feminist to say my contribution is healthy, well balanced children. And that is a contribution. Like it's not just about my money, career, my music career, or how much money we make or any of that, really. Those are all secondary to what you contribute to the world, which is the future of humanity. So children aren't needed anymore. But children can be wanted for their own sakes and are wanted by people with very specific beliefs about children. Illuminated by the Fire of Faith One mom, Amanda, said, when I think about all the work, go out and speak or start a charitable foundation that helps people, which I want to do, and I'm going to do. Nothing I ever do will be more purposeful, meaningful, and have more impact on a human than giving them a body and then nurturing them as a human. And because of my religious beliefs, I also know that relationship is eternal. So for me, it's the most worthwhile thing that I will do in this life. She said to me. Is that making sense? I asked my students a few months ago, what would I have to give you to make you buy a horse? The answer was a room of blank stares and confusion. One girl asked, but why would we want a horse? And a young man said flatly, a horse is just a liability. That is the status of children today. The remedy is to reclaim the supernatural value of the child, to announce and give witness to the central biblical tenet that the child is most desirable, the child is most lovable, and that the child bears the image and likeness of the Most High God. For it is by knowledge of the Heavenly Father that we know the lovability of his creatures. The fire of faith is the antivenom to this economic wound that children now bear. The ordinary calculus of the world subordinates children to adult needs. But by the fire of faith our hearts are softened and our selfishness burned away by its light. We seek children when the world seeks comfort. We live for the eternal and not for the present. We discern in the cross the plow of new life. So three things follow. First, the salvation of the world is found in our families and specifically in our births. The way we give witness to the change we would like to see is by embracing marriage and bringing forth new life. Second, life giving families are the ultimate resource, a life giving spring. Nations and princes may wall off that life force, cover it over as they have in many times and places, but they cannot summon it, they cannot command it. The source of the life giving family is faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Third, we must look to the strength and vitality of living religious communities. It is in the temple where we find those reasons of the heart that justify the heavy personal cost of having kids. And so religious liberty is the best family policy. My advice to governments this isn't a program of doing nothing. Rather, it's a program of relentless deference to churches as the providers of a public good that nations cannot buy. Talk to their members, bring them into policy conversations, find out how they see the world and ask their let churches run schools and pass on their values, don't spend their tax money on things they find evil. Give pride of place in law and policy to religious colleges and universities. They out produce young and fruitful marriages by every measure and finally root out welfare programs that compete with the rightful work of the people of God. If states and nations aim to meet the needs of families directly and not through churches, the polis becomes a secularizing force as families replace a religious mode of needs meeting. And that was the American mode that dominated in the 19th century with instead a secular mode of needs meeting more like the New Deal mode. The government must do less so that churches can do more. And in so doing, churches can return the hearts of people to their God, breathing new life into the American family. There is no reason to despair about all this. The conviction that marriage is holy and children are wantable still leads young men and women to lead countercultural lives. This conviction explains why Israel's birth rate is above replacement, and it explains the difference in state by state birth rates in the United States. People of all faiths, and none at all who have children today are united by the view that having kids is as worthy of pursuit as other noble pursuits, climbing high mountains, making great art and falling in love. And this is not as hard or as expensive as the failed policy approach. It happens every day. More than half of the women I interviewed did not want their final family size when they started out. Fertility desires are changeable. Life experiences, new information and religious conversions are just a few of the ways that people come around to wanting children. This is old fashioned missionary work, and with God's grace it works to announce and give witness to the central tenet of the Judeo Christian tradition. In that interview six years ago, Esther's husband quipped to me with his Jewish beard and a maga hat, is your study to make fertility great again? I laughed. Not quite. But if you had to ask me, how can we make family great again? I couldn't come up with a better answer than to say Light in America the fire of faith again. Thank you.
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