← Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
Modern Baby Boom: The Return Of Big Families | Catherine Pakaluk
01:16:46
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- [00:00]
Alex Clark
Public schools are actually forcing premature separation between parents and children.
- [00:06]
Katherine Hackl
This isn't new that the academic elites are kind of telling the wrong story. And what that does is it makes the relationships less rewarding. The child naturally feels rejected.
- [00:14]
Alex Clark
A woman has to want to put her kids first, always, forever, until death. And that is unbelievably countercultural. That is unbelievably, unpolitically correct. And yet it is the truth. 5% of college educated American women are choosing to defy today's cultural norms and have five or more children.
- [01:01]
Co-host
My guest today is a social scientist, mother of eight herself, and traveled around the country to interview these moms on not only how they're handling such a.
- [01:10]
Alex Clark
Large family in this economy, but why this was an important choice for them and our nation.
- [01:14]
Co-host
If you have always dreamed of a big family but are unsure how people afford it, have one yourself or just find large families fascinating. This interview reviews my guest research and connection of some of the most extraordinary.
- [01:27]
Alex Clark
Countercultural women among us.
- [01:28]
Co-host
As she says, if America has a future, these women are the reason Cold chills Watch this interview on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel. Make sure you leave a five star review for us if you appreciate unique guests like today's and look for a link to make a tax deductible donation to support the show in the Show Notes. This podcast is possible because of generous donations from listeners like you. Her brand new book is called Hannah's Children the Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Please welcome author and social scientist Kather Hackalook on today's episode of Culture Apothecary.
- [02:03]
Alex Clark
How did we become a two child world?
- [02:06]
Katherine Hackl
That is the question. And in fact we're a two child world trending to a one child world. So it's even crazier than a really.
- [02:13]
Co-host
Yes, yes, one child world.
- [02:15]
Katherine Hackl
Why we are trending to a one child world? That is the question. That is what everybody's wondering. I think the quick answer is that family and women's career, they're on a collision course.
- [02:26]
Alex Clark
It could be seen as pretty radical to be telling women you need to be having more kids. The plummeting birth rate is starting to frighten people. Why is that a concern?
- [02:36]
Katherine Hackl
It's a concern publicly because of the economic consequences of a plummeting birth rate. The reason policymakers are starting to ask the question is because we can't pay for all of the social programs we've been used to paying for if the population is shrinking and if the working population is shrinking. And so that's the situation that we're in now. So that may not be the most important reason to worry about it, but that is certainly the reason that all the policymakers are wondering about it today. We're used to thinking perhaps because of a bunch of, we'll just say population scares from the 20th century. We are used to thinking that just there's too many people.
- [03:21]
Alex Clark
Yeah, I'm always hearing that we have too many people.
- [03:24]
Katherine Hackl
Yes, yes. And this is part of the climate alarmism that we're living through now. But this climate alarmism didn't start yesterday. So today we hear a lot about the different, the impact of the human population on the planet. That's the kind of thing that you hear about the carbon footprint and the way we're changing the man made climate change and that kind of thing. The earlier version of this was I think, less focused on the quality of the planet. The thing that people were worried about in the 60s and the 70s, less worried about the quality of the climate and more concerned about how many people there are on the planet and can this planet support all of those people. So that earlier concern, there's just too many people kind of morphed into well, maybe there's not too many people, but the few of us that there are, we're ruining the planet. Right. So this is all bound up together.
- [04:15]
Alex Clark
You're a social scientist who set out on this multi year journey and you are going to travel America, interview college educated women on why they chose to have five or more children. What were you looking to find out doing this study and how did you conduct the study?
- [04:31]
Katherine Hackl
Suppose you looked around and you realized that the whole world was suffering from some kind of, let's say sickness or some kind of failure to thrive. Let's just suppose, you know, you found out that health in, in America wasn't doing so good and you thought, well, is this just. The future is everywhere we look, there's no healthfulness. And then you, some, someone told you, you know, over in that little corner of Arizona or that little mountaintop in the Rocky Mountains, there's somebody really healthy. And we've just interviewed them a lot of times. I basically thought, okay look, you know, this is a two child world trending to a one child world. Is that the whole story of birth rates in America? It turns out it's not all over the place. Hidden away mostly not visible to people. There are these larger, more generous looking families, obviously more three, four, five, six children. So the simple question was, could we learn anything from those people or are they just anomalies you know, they're idiosyncratic, they can't tell us anything. But I had a hunch that maybe in a sick world, talking to people who managed to be healthy might be something that we could learn from them. Right. There's this really funny account on X. There's a guy that goes around Miami beach and he interviews people over the age of 40 who are super fit. And he just asks them, what are you doing? Tell me your routine, what do you eat? What do you do? What's your workout like? And why is this funny? Because we know that most of us over the age of 40, we're not super fit. So the proposition is we can learn from people who are going against the grain, who've somehow managed to make it work when everybody else is lacking in fitness. Um, and so with this birth rate question, as a social scientist, I thought, okay, 5% of American women are still having, let's say, the desired family size, the number of children that they want to have. They're not two child families turning to one child. So let's just talk to them and find out what's going on. Are they just anomalies? Was there something intentional here? What do they do? What do they think, what do they believe? And how have they managed to do this? Could we learn anything from that?
- [06:43]
Alex Clark
Why college educated women, specifically, I'll say.
- [06:46]
Katherine Hackl
It now, and I always say it when I've interviewed, not because I think of college education as any kind of norm or standard for today. I think the college education bubble may be bursting in lots of ways. The reason I interviewed college educated women is because when we look around the world, we look at the globe of this changing population dynamic, the thing that looks like the problem, it looks like women's education is the problem. The more education women pursue, the lower the birth rate is. And that seems like a kind of law or it's like an iron rule. So if you can find college educated women who seem to defy that trend, that's where you might get some traction, you might get some lessons. So that was the reason, because that's what looks like the real tension is. My hunch was that education, education isn't on its own going to be the thing that militates against having families. But it's probably values. It's probably the values that are either coming out of that education or it's the timeline or something else. But kind of digging into that, that was the project.
- [07:54]
Alex Clark
Now I'm just going to say that someone from the outside looking in who is like so what? This lady wrote a book that's all about having big families. You're a staunch Catholic. Is this just some rah rah religious book against birth control? What would you say to.
- [08:09]
Katherine Hackl
Turns out it's not a rah rah book against birth control. And in fact, I write about that specifically because in general, when I tell people, hey, you know, all over this country there are people with five, six, seven, eight or more children. People can't believe it. Those are numbers that are really hard to believe. And of course, there's a reason I talk to people with families that large. But the first question I always get is, are these just people who don't believe in birth control?
- [08:34]
Alex Clark
Yes, and I think a lot of people make that connection because you're also very staunchly Catholic and that's historically been a Catholic Catholic Church belief. But then I, I learned for the first time in your book that most Catholics have basically completely abandoned the, the anti contraceptive conversation.
- [08:51]
Katherine Hackl
In fact, I think that was true from the beginning. I don't think there's ever been a time, at least based on my knowledge, in this country, when Catholics writ large accepted that, that official position of the, the Catholic Church.
- [09:01]
Alex Clark
So this is just like a myth, like a cultural myth?
- [09:03]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, I think it is. Now listen, when, when Catholics came over here as, as immigrants in the 19th century and the early 20th century, they were associated with larger families, right? So, you know, that's not totally a myth. They, they were. But that a hundred years ago looks like it does today. Immigrants tend to come from places with lower education and who are sort of behind the demographic trends. And Catholic birth rates, when they came to this country, ultimately converged to the regular birth rates in this country, Protestant birth rates. So it was not a myth, but it was a kind of, it was not as intentional as people imagined it to be. So what is going on? It's not a birth control story. So what I did is I know I talk to people of all different religions and one of the really interesting things to find out is that in this day and age, anyway, you know, the people that I talk to, these are really intentional families. These are families that are being built, in a sense, one child at a time. People who had three, they thought they got to three and they thought, gee, should we have another one? Very open to having another one. Well, we could talk about what that looks like. There's prayer, there's discernment, there's thinking about what that fourth child might mean for the family. There's that whole process again. Oftentimes a prayerful decision, a decision in view of all of the circumstances of the family. But everybody I talked to, and this stands to reason, felt that they had a way to pick the timing of their child. I mean, so for lack of a better word, to plan their families. Many women I talked to use sort of natural methods to plan their families. They use the timing of their cycle and those sorts of things that we know. We're much better at knowing how to do that today. And I think it's something girls should know about. So a lot of women talked about that, but certainly many of the women that I interviewed just used, you know, sort of ordinary means to space their children.
- [10:54]
Alex Clark
How did you find these women for the study? I mean, are they all. Are they all Amish? Are they all bored with nothing to do? That's why they're having all these kids? These are the stereotypes.
- [11:03]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. So I went around the country, and I. We picked cities based on. We wanted some geographic diversity. We wanted to find out. Well, it would have been interesting. Suppose you found out the only people who have big families are living in Kansas or living in North Texas or something. We went all over the country. The West Coast, California, Seattle, Spokane.
- [11:20]
Alex Clark
And who's we?
- [11:21]
Katherine Hackl
Me and my research assistants. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
- [11:24]
Co-host
This is the real deal.
- [11:25]
Alex Clark
This is like true investigative journalism, and it's fascinating.
- [11:28]
Katherine Hackl
You can't do this by yourself or on your own completely. And I always like to say we because in a sense, you know, I can't take full credit for this. And I mentioned my great research assistants in the book, but we. If you hit a city like, you know, Houston, and you say, all right, we'd like to interview people who fit this profile in Houston. You go, where are the families? And so you call a contact in Houston, you say, where are the families? And you go on Facebook and you find the moms groups. And what will often happen is, like, well, there's a big church over there. There's a lot of families over there. You might find a community center, but in a lot of places, it was churches. You go to these churches and you find people. What did we do? We just posted flyers. We said, if you have a lot of kids and you consider your family size, you know, purposeful, intentional, we would love to talk to you. And so people could scan a QR code and they could go and, you know, fill up some details. And so we then picked from 500 or so people who applied from all over the country. We picked about 60.
- [12:24]
Co-host
This is fascinating.
- [12:25]
Alex Clark
And so truly Random. You had like a really random sample size. They're not all religious, they're not all white.
- [12:32]
Katherine Hackl
I want to clarify, it's not truly random, but this is the best practice for selecting a small sample size when you have to interview that many people. A random sample would have involved, like us canvassing the whole country and maybe selecting with some sort of funny method. But it is, I didn't pick, you know, these are people we knew. So what happens is they apply. So 500 people apply, say, and you know, okay, we don't want to only interview people who are in Presbyterian churches or only interview people who are Jewish. So we looked at that 500 and we tried to select out a kind of a meaningful diversity of religious backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds. Yeah, so just what you said. So you are doing this by hand, but you're trying to do it in a way that resembles the American population as best you can.
- [13:19]
Alex Clark
Were all of them stay at home moms or were some of them also mothers of big families working full time?
- [13:28]
Katherine Hackl
It was a mixture. I think in my population, the women I interviewed, around 30% of them were working full time in some capacity. I say there were some professors, there were some lawyers, some doctors, but this is 30%, so obviously not the whole sample. And then another big middle section, you know, maybe another 30% was working part time. Some of those were part time jobs that they held from home. And then another, you know, maybe 30% were full time stay at home moms. But I also want to stress that in the interviews that came out, that did not, that changed over the lifetime for a lot of the women. So some of them had worked full time and had switched to part time when they had more children. For some of them went the other way. So, yeah, not at all. One size fits all.
- [14:13]
Alex Clark
So I have talked extensively to Suzanne Venker and we talk about how women are growing up. They're becoming a lot of them resentful that they were not given they feel good advice when it comes to pursuing career and family and education and planning for the likely scenario that they will eventually want to stay home. And they just feel like we aren't given the tools early enough to make informed choices as women when it comes to family planning. And so I thought it was really interesting that some of the women in the book talk to you about having this sense of betrayal, which is, is exactly what Suzanne Venker has discussed, and how, you know, they have this desire for children in a home, but they also have all of this time, all of all of these Years. All of this money wrapped up in an education or some sort of vocational training.
- [15:03]
Katherine Hackl
You use the word family planning and in exactly the way that I came to use it after my book. Right. So in the wider community, family planning means how to stop having babies or how to not have babies when you're sexually active with family planning. But what I heard was a different kind of family planning, which is sort of, you have. In this, in this culture, you have to be quite intentional about planning the conditions of your life so that you can have a family. And that's, that's amazing. That's kind of wild. I think a lot of the reason we don't think about planning for family that way is because we've assumed for so long it will just happen. Obviously, parts of the feminist movement, parts of our culture that are antinatal or anti family, have focus in on, you know, the real women's empowerment, the real women's fulfillment and you know, in ways that from a young age you're being coached in school. I was just thinking about this. Look, high schools have college counselors, they have career counselors, but they don't have somebody standing around in every high school saying, now here's some things you could think about if you know that you want to make it possible to have a family by the time you're 30 or by the time you're 25. So we don't think about it. We think it will just happen. But it doesn't just happen, as we know. Right. So this two child world trending to a one child world. We do know from some survey evidence that that's not what women in general want.
- [16:25]
Alex Clark
When you talk to some of these women who had an extensive educational background that then became mothers, especially the ones that did become full time stay at home moms, did any of them have a feeling like they were missing out, like they were not living up to their full potential?
- [16:41]
Katherine Hackl
What I heard was more language of there are trade offs in life and anything worth doing involves doing a little less of something else and a little more of something else. So. So yeah, some of the women talked about, well, gee, I'd like to get back to my music career, but it's on the back burner for now. And that's coming. So what I heard was women who really had a lot of pursuits and a lot of interests, some of them were currently pursuing them, you know, working in different ways. But others of them said, yeah, it was a loss to put some of their personal pursuits on the back burner. But as one lady said it doesn't mean it's on the back burner forever. You're just rotating things and it's going to come to the front later. And I think that's a really interesting message about, you know, you can't do everything at the same time, right? But you do have to pick your priorities and decide which things you can live without. Like, what are the things you're going to regret not doing later? So, like Suzanne Venker talks about the sense of betrayal. I think that's real. And a lot of women do kind of hit their mid-30s, maybe their early 40s, and see that it's not what they hoped for or expected. And they do feel betrayed because they don't remember choosing to be on a train where they never came up for air and never got to sort of ask like, is this what I, what I expected out of life? And I think we can assist the culture by helping people to ask that question much earlier on. Like, no one's telling you, you know, you could take a year off after high school before you go to college and you could, you know, explore some of these different things and take time to think about it. But it's just, you know, pass that test, go right into the next thing.
- [18:28]
Co-host
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- [20:31]
Alex Clark
What are the biggest reasons that people today are scared of having a big family?
- [20:35]
Katherine Hackl
I think people are scared of having a family at all. So. So I think, I think most people don't contemplate having a big family. And of course I want to stress that my book isn't so much recommending that people have big families or they think there's a lot of unintended benefits or benefits people haven't thought about. And it's not so much about having a big family, but about what can we learn from people who've taken this cold plunge, so to speak? Great. So that sounds like something I'd never want to do. But I've been told there's a lot of benefit to cold plunge. A lot of it for a lot of people, maybe most people is being scared of the unknown because you spend most of your life as a young woman doing things that are really different from starting a family. Right? So you're, you know, you're good in kindergarten, you're good in fifth grade, you're good at eighth grade, you're good at high school. I mean, all those things are good to be good at, but they're not at all the same as having a baby. When you're in a two child world, most people didn't grow up knowing a baby. Think about that. So I think there's a very widespread lack of knowledge. Say you're 24, you like what you're, you like your job, you like your coworkers, you like what you're up to. And every day there's a choice to keep doing that. But the family thing is like a, it's like a very scary different thing. And you're not sure you'll be good at it. You're not sure you'll like it. You recognize you can't return it if you don't like it.
- [21:56]
Alex Clark
Some of the women in my audience might be listening to this, struggling with infertility, and they're like, I don't know if I can listen to this episode. What. What do you say to those women?
- [22:04]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. First of all, you know, I'm so sorry. Right. That's one of the. Maybe the greatest suffering, I think, that you can have is to. To want to have a child and not have a child. A lot of the women that I talked to had struggled with infertility at different points in their lives, and. And they do talk about that. So I, of course, I hope that this work wouldn't be a source of grief for anybody in particular. But I do want to appeal a little bit to the biblical Hannah. So the biblical Hannah. This book is named for the biblical Hannah in part because she goes through both. She is infertile for most of her life, and we know that in the Bible, she prays desperately for a child, and then God hears her prayer. And Samuel, the. That Samuel has sent to her as a gift. And so I really wanted to invoke that sense that infertility is a huge cross. And I think we actually. To acknowledge it for what it is requires that we as a culture recognize what a great gift children are. And in a world where we don't recognize what a great gift children are, the burden of infertility is invisible to me.
- [23:11]
Alex Clark
There is a difference between someone who is struggling with infertility, obviously desiring a child, and it's just not happening, or it's not God's will, it's not God's timing for you yet, versus a woman who is purposefully putting off motherhood because she is unwilling to become the sort of selfless that motherhood would require. Do you feel like that is a growing concern in society?
- [23:37]
Katherine Hackl
Yes. So what do we know? We know that in biological infertility is growing. As best we understand, we are all a little bit less fertile than we used to be. And that's something that I think probably modern medicine doesn't devote enough energy to understanding. I suspect it's a byproduct of many things, including various toxic, like, aspects of our lifestyle. The way we eat, the way we. The way we do or don't exercise. I mean, all kinds of things that are about our lifestyle. Um, but we also know that a good amount of what's going on is prob. The. The lion's share is just being unwilling to make that Shift. I, I'm hesitant to apply the label of, you know, selfishness. I'm going to go ahead and use the word selfishness, but what.
- [24:23]
Alex Clark
Or narcissism.
- [24:24]
Katherine Hackl
Or narcissism. It would be difficult for me to talk about the interviews that, that I had without using that word.
- [24:31]
Alex Clark
Why?
- [24:31]
Katherine Hackl
Because the women that I talked to used it about themselves.
- [24:35]
Alex Clark
Really? Yeah.
- [24:36]
Katherine Hackl
So they talked about the way in which having children freed them from a kind of narcissism or self centeredness that they were unaware they were trapped in.
- [24:45]
Alex Clark
Oh my gosh. That's probably a huge struggle for many women.
- [24:48]
Katherine Hackl
Speaking from my own experience, that first baby comes and all of a sudden you realize that you had spent your entire day up until that moment thinking about yourself. Yeah.
- [24:57]
Alex Clark
Focusing on yourself always.
- [24:59]
Katherine Hackl
And not in a bad way. Look, I think it's right that we should focus on ourselves. There's a kind of proper self love. Right. We could talk about that proper self love. And actually, many parts of our culture don't encourage a proper self love. Right. People use this word, self care today, and I think that's kind of overused in a bad way. However, there's some. It gets at something, right? There's a proper self love. If you're not responsible for anyone by yourself, it's not a bad thing that you spend your time planning and when you're going to do all your things. But that first baby comes and you go, whoa. Like, whoa. And I thought, I would never take a shower again. Now that was not true. But for a few weeks I just thought, thought, I'm just gone. Like, there's gonna. I. How can I thrive this way? But that's a huge shift, right? That shift from being able to think about yourself all day long to thinking about someone else and then try it again and then try it a third time. And by the time you get through that two or three times, you look back and you go, wow. Number one, I was a. I was a weaker, worse person because I was. I had only learned to look after myself. And number two, I wouldn't trade it. I, I love that I've learned to look after other people. And I don't want to go back to being that version of me. I love this version of me. And then maybe the final step, like the final frontier of this thing is you start to realize you can turn that new skill that you have of looking after your children, but you can turn that outward on all kinds of other things.
- [26:26]
Alex Clark
I think we've got this like, sense of hyper individualism in America, that's just tearing us apart from the inside out.
- [26:32]
Katherine Hackl
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. So the women I talked to were unflinching in referring to their own former selves as being individualistic, not necessarily through any fault of their own, because I think that's how we grow up. I mean, we grow up like we're just concerned with ourselves, but in a sense, then there's this remedy in front of us. Right.
- [26:51]
Alex Clark
So one of my favorite parenting books of all time, and I interviewed the author, was Jefferson Beth Keys, Take Back youk Family.
- [26:58]
Co-host
I love that book.
- [26:59]
Alex Clark
I don't know if you've ever read it, but in it, he talks about how he believes the promotion of the nuclear family. Having mom, dad, you know, on average, two kids. Separate them from all of your extended family. Move somewhere else. This nuclear family, as opposed to the multigenerational family, was one of the most catastrophic cultural decisions that we have ever made as a country. How do you feel about that?
- [27:24]
Katherine Hackl
I think that's. There's a lot of wisdom in that. I want to hesitate, in a sense that I don't think it was a decision that we made as a country. Like, it's. It's the outcome of a lot of little decisions. And you look back, you go, how did we get here? And obviously, it's a good thing that people are able to move to other states and get jobs to support themselves. Right. So we don't want to hack away at that. But did we come to think of living near family as a liability instead of the blessing and the gift that it is? I think we did.
- [27:55]
Alex Clark
Yeah.
- [27:55]
Katherine Hackl
I think we did. And so we celebrate this thing. You know, you hear this language of, I wouldn't want to be a burden to my children. You hear this from older people as they're retiring. They save up. They don't want to be a burden. And I think to myself, that is a toxic view. Why? Why? Because it's great to be a burden on other people? No, I don't mean that in a negative sense, but why is it toxic? Because I think that's the meaning of family. The meaning of family is that it's a network of kin. And our whole job is to look after and care for each other. So parents care for their children when they're young. And the natural course of things is that as we grow older, we care for our parents. Now, setting aside true cases of abuse or cases where that cannot happen, it certainly ought to be the norm that we think we take care of each other.
- [28:44]
Alex Clark
Do you think we need to go back to a time where children were providing an economic value to the household.
- [28:49]
Katherine Hackl
I don't know that we could do that on purpose. Yeah, I don't know. We could do that on purpose. I think that people fundamentally do things because they know need to do them or they want to do them. I mean, I think those are sort of the two driving reasons why people do anything. Right. So, for instance, people talk a lot about, we don't do enough community anymore. What does community do for us? Does it fulfill any of our needs? Right. So we can meet most of our needs for social interaction on our phones. Or maybe, you know, we don't relax with community anymore. I can relax with my television set or my. Whatever, my Netflix. Whereas there was a time when the only place to recreate was gonna be at the bowling hall down the road thinking about family. Yeah, there was a time when children had more economic value to the household. And so, you know, it would've been a dumb economic decision to purposefully just be done after one child. Like, who's gonna pick. Get the water from the well?
- [29:43]
Alex Clark
We're putting them to work.
- [29:43]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, exactly. Who's gonna peel all those potatoes? You know, like, things like that. I think it would be unnatural to go back to that. I do think we should think harder about the way in which some of our social programs. Social Security, it's about as American as apple pie, I would say, Social Security program. But what it does do is it means that having a lot of children because somebody will take care of you when you get older, it's no longer something people need to do.
- [30:11]
Alex Clark
One of the moms that you talk to in the book said to you, actually, me having so many kids, putting the older siblings in charge of helping with the younger siblings, giving all of my kids tasks on helping run this household, I think has insulated them from anxiety and depression because kids need a purpose. They need to feel like they're contributing to the home and that her kids and her family in general, she thinks, are so much happier because they do that.
- [30:38]
Katherine Hackl
100. So these are the sort of. Of lost. The lost wisdom of, you know, so I don't know that anybody ought to have extra children so that there are these, like, amazing dynamics that occur in way we grow up our children. But, like, if you did have a bunch of kids and then all of a sudden you saw, gosh, like, this is a better way to raise kids, because look at what happens. Well, that's something we ought to think about, because it's like. It's like A lost wisdom. What I heard from moms like that was something that I heard across all these interviews with all these moms, you know, and we think about the people who are telling us today about the anxious generation, work of Jonathan Haidt, work of Abigail Stryer, like how do we, these depressed, anxious kids that are all growing up, I'm sure the smartphones are a lot of the reason, but what if one of the reasons is that our teenagers don't have little siblings, they don't have anybody to take care of. And you know the other fun thing about little siblings, like if you have a two year old brother and you're a 16 year old guy coming home from high school and you know you're pimply and you're like insecure and you maybe had a bad day at school and you come home and you know what? That two year old thinks that you are a hero. Like you are the greatest thing ever. And you come home and that kid. So yeah, there's a lot of things that came out of these interviews that I wasn't looking for. And they just popped out at me.
- [32:00]
Alex Clark
The big question everyone wants to know, how are these big American families affording to live? Including you, you got eight kids.
- [32:09]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. Well, I think that the message that came across to me was it's not, it's not as expensive as it looks like. It's just a question of what you're going to give up. Now, I don't want to gloss over the obvious difficulties. There are certainly difficulties here and there. But generally speaking, what did people say? And I really wasn't after logistics. I was after like, why would you do this? But the kinds of things that came up a lot, you know, like you can thrift your clothing for your family, you reuse so many things. Yeah. At some point you make a transition to a larger vehicle. But once you've made that transition, you know, after like your third kid to the fourth kid, now you're out of a small car. Well then that bigger car fits a bunch more kids. So it's not an extra expense every time. So something like the extra costs aren't, they're not double or triple they, the extra costs, the marginal costs go down with like larger numbers of children. So that was one of the big messages that came through, was actually that it's not as expensive as it looks like now. Okay. Are there some things that might not be possible? Yeah. One woman talked about how when she and her husband were thinking about, I don't remember if it was like six to seven or it was something like in that range. They had their kids in private school and they realized if we have another kid, it's going to mean we're going to have to homeschool. Like we're not going to pay for private school anymore for six children. That's just an over the top question. So. But then they said, well, would we rather have another kid or would we rather keep using private school? She says, well, we looked at each other like that's easy. We're homeschoolers now. So you know, that's again, this isn't prescriptive. Like this is what everybody has to do. But they're kind of, they're examples.
- [33:49]
Alex Clark
What was some of the like most unique money saving tips that you discovered within these families?
- [33:54]
Katherine Hackl
One of the funniest ones that I heard, which is gonna, it is funny, but it was set, it was said by one of the wealthiest moms that I talked to. She said that they go on these little staycations, they live in a pretty, a pretty ritzy suburb of a major city. And she said that like once a month they'll, they'll get a hotel room at like a low end hotel nearby that's like, you know, 120 bucks. And they'll take the kids there for like, they'll check in as early as you can and check out as late as you can. And there's a pool and they'll take the kids and the kids just go in the pool all day, tire themselves out. They'll order pizza, the kids just, everybody will just sleep on the floor. And I thought that was like hilarious. So they just view this as like this is what they do for fun. Once a month they go to this thing. And I thought that's so funny and it's so creative. I mean, who's ever thought of just renting a room at a hotel just so your kids could go in the pool?
- [34:43]
Alex Clark
Are there examples of God's providence finance financially and straight up miracles occurring amongst large families?
- [34:51]
Katherine Hackl
Well, certainly by their accounts, I heard a lot of those sorts of things. You asked about money, it would be important to mention that a lot of the women felt that at key points in their, in their family's history when they felt that money would be a concern, that they trusted that concern to God and that God provided in different ways. We used to use the language of God's providence. Like that's a, that's a phrase that everybody would have used to have known was God's providence. And so, so obviously A lot of these families are families with serious and devout religious faith, and they felt that God would provide. One lady had a long series, you know, like, oh, there was this kid, and then we didn't know if we'd get that job. And we got that job. And so you can't exactly put that together into a single rule. Like, this is how it's going to work out.
- [35:36]
Alex Clark
One woman you talk to named Esther, she told you straight up, the quote was, our finances just don't add up at all. And she said it was as if God was materializing money or needs were being taken care of out of thin air for their family on a monthly basis.
- [35:56]
Co-host
That is wild.
- [35:58]
Alex Clark
Almost unbelievable.
- [35:59]
Katherine Hackl
Certainly this country is a very generous country, right? We know that we top the charts in terms of giving. And, you know, my social media feed is full of, you know, I don't know, gifts and goes and all these sorts of things. I grew up in a large family, and I remember it was kind of embarrassing. We didn't need it. But people used to drive by, like, push clothing out of their cars. This is, you know, like in the 1980s, like bags of clothes that they might have taken to the Salvation army and they would push them outside of. That sounds terrible. Like you'd think, how embarrassing would that be? We didn't need it. But point is, this is a generous country and I think there are tremendous opportunities for people to help each other and to assist each other. And I heard a lot of those stories. People showing up to help with tuition, people showing up to help with this or with that. Danielle in this, in the book, referring to something completely different. But I think it's appropriate here, too. She said, you know, when you're trying to do something kind of that's worldly and cool, you're going to medical school or you're going to go, like, climb Mount Everest. It's a big deal. She said people are very happy to, like, help and pitch in, right, because they think it's such a great goal. She said, But a lot of times you feel that when you say you want to do something like have another kid, people just kind of, like, shrug their shoulders and, like, that's just you ask for it. But what I did find is that in most women I talked to lived in church communities or neighborhoods where it had become, you know, normalized, that people are doing this. They drop off clothing, they give you, like, their hand me downs, like, so. So, yeah, wild miracles. Our finances don't make sense. I heard that a lot. Of course, I Talked to people who were very well off and they were doing fine. But I did talk to people on food stamps at the lower end of the income spectrum. And you know, again, it's not a prescriptive. It's not like, go out and do this and God will provide for you. That is not the message here. But the message is actually to paint a portrait of this is a lifestyle that's possible in this country and it's possible all over this country. But it requires a little bit of creativity and maybe seeing things differently and thinking about what you're willing to give up.
- [38:06]
Co-host
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Alex Clark
Okay?
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- [40:50]
Alex Clark
You write about two different ways of life that were highlighted by Hannah in the Bible. Fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing versus fitting children into a narrative of the self. Tell us about these two different paths.
- [41:07]
Katherine Hackl
So a narrative of the south is like a story. We, what, what is the story we think we're part of? And in the, in the Bible and in maybe times past, we understood ourselves more clearly to be part of a story of our family history, our ancestry. Like right, you know, when, when Jesus finally comes, you know, there's this story of the ancestry of Jesus and I can't tell you all those names like it's, it's pages and pages. Right? You're liking that it was this guy, was the father of this guy, was the father of this guy. And I mean most of us, we probably can't really name more than our grandparents. One of the things that seemed distinctive to me after talking to 55 women who helped built these large families was that they had come to think of their own personal story as a story about giving rise to new life and new generations and seeing themselves as part of a chain. Then what happened was, well, if this is your story, your story is I'm the mother of Joseph. Joseph. And I'm the mother of Valerie and I'm the mother of Gregory. Well, that's your story. That's kind of who you are. Well, but I also might be an economist. I also might be a lawyer. Okay, that's great. Well, how does that fit into being the mother of Joseph? So that's kind of this narrative of childbearing. And you fit the personal commitments, passions, interests, this personality into that story. And it seems like a small shift, but it was the kind of thing that people. So you thought, okay, so if you can make the story of your generations your main story, well, then what you do is you just. You look at all these other things because these are things that might be in conflict, and you just modify them so they fit. And so there's. I mean, gosh, it's never been easier, in a sense, for a woman today. It's never been easier to fit personal interests, talents, callings, vocations, missionary work. I mean, I don't mean to. I don't mean to make any of that sound small. Those things are huge. They're really important. I mean, you meet people all the time. I really feel called to serve in this way. And this way is outside of my home and is. Well. But if your narrative is generations in childbirth, I'm the mother of Joseph, I'm the mother of Valerie. Well, then what you do naturally is you go, okay, so how can I. How can I pull this calling to serve in this way into this life of being the mother of Joseph? And a lot of times it looked like something that was kind of a cool mashup, like, you know, people would be bringing their children into that vocation to serve in another way. So it sounds like a slight difference in emphasis.
- [43:46]
Alex Clark
There was another passage in your book. This was crazy. So you wrote, modern contraceptives, unbundled sex, and babies in the household decision set, making each an isolated, separate object that is subject to isolated, separate human desires. So we can speak of demand for children just as we speak of demand for housing, education, status, lifestyle, wealth. You wrote, children do not need to be planned around. They need to be planned for. When children can be chosen or not chosen independently from sexual activity, the standard for the right age to have a child begins to rise after your degree or that trip or that house or that promotion. Time is a rival good. And more time spent on other valuable things necessarily then squeezes out time for having children. In short, you wrote, the propensity to have children responds to incentives like all other human activity. Wow, that is convicting. What are you trying to say there?
- [44:53]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, what I'm trying to say is that having children has Become an opt in. And that's because of modern contraceptives. They're really good. They're really effective at what they do. In other words, like, if you decided, well, I'd like to live a life without children, you could do that. In the old days, if you wanted to live a life without children, you would have also had to be a celibate person and never get married and never fall in love. No one thinks today that that would be a good way to live your life, to never fall in love, to never be married, to never build a household or a home with somebody. But it is an actual option to fall in love and build a home and a household and never have a child. So I actually think most people do want to have a child. But what's happened is because you get to choose those two things separately, you can fall in love and get married, but then you later choose when is the right time to have a child. Before modern contraceptives, you just got married and you know what happened? Usually you had a kid because why? Because sex makes babies. That's what I'm trying to say is that once you separate these two things out, we now need to think about. About did you want that baby? Do you want that baby? So in fact, what we would say, demand for children. That's the economist like, dumb word we say demand. It doesn't really. But our desire for children, do we want to have them? We used to need to have them. Why? Because we all do need to fall in love and to be in beautiful, wonderful partnerships. I think that's a fundamental human need. And if you look around, nobody's trying to do without that. And I think that what's happened is because you have to opt into the child piece, you get married and then you do you, you think, when's the right time to demand that?
- [46:27]
Alex Clark
You're saying that there is a reason that people are getting married later and having kids later, that we're basically being bribed as a culture to put off having kids. So then my question would be, and I think a lot of people's question would be, would a change in public policy change it?
- [46:43]
Katherine Hackl
Yes and no. Yes and no. So not the kind that most people think about. Out. I think most people think about a change in public policy that would involve like, you just used the word bribe. Like the culture is bribing us to go in this direction. And I think people think about changes in public policy that would look more directly like a bribe.
- [46:59]
Alex Clark
More extensive maternity leave, fixing the gender wage gap. If you Believe in that. Tax incentives, things like that. But what did you discover?
- [47:07]
Katherine Hackl
All right, well, here's a hot take. All right. Nature's bribe to have children is getting married and having sex. Ex. It's kind of a bribe, right? It's like, this is the thing you don't want to live without. And it's sort of like you may or may not think you want that first child, or you may not think you're ready, but guess what? Here it comes. Because you wanted to get married, and of course you should want to get married. It's. It's great. So that was nature's bribe. So we undid that. So now you have to choose. And then the question would be, are any of these, like, maternity. Longer maternity leaves or tax incentives? Are those big enough bribes to get people over the hump of, like, it's not the right time, or I want to finish my law degree or. Or I want to do this. It doesn't look like it. And why do I say that? Because countries have been experimenting with these kinds of policy bribes to have children for decades. So countries like Japan and Korea, Austria, Australia, parts of Western Europe have been way ahead of us on this, and they've all tried to orient their public policy in ways to kind of directly incentivize people to have children. None of it's worked successfully. Right. If it had worked, we'd all be looking at that country. We'd be saying, oh, let's go be like them. None of these countries has a birthday rate that's a sustainable birth rate. So basically, does not look like you can directly sort of bribe or incentivize people to have children. I did say yes and no. So what about the yes piece? Well, just really quickly, let's just say cultures that still prize the connection of sex and marriage, which.
- [48:36]
Alex Clark
Who would that be today?
- [48:37]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, those would be like living religious communities that are fairly biblical, like Jewish communities, communities. All. All sorts of Protestant communities. Now, I won't say it won't be everybody in all of those churches. We all know that there's people who go by the name of. Of whatever and don't really practice. They don't really believe.
- [48:53]
Alex Clark
Nominal Christians, nominal Jews.
- [48:55]
Katherine Hackl
Exactly, Exactly. So, but you look around the country, you go, oh, it's not just a coincidence that the people who are really trying to uphold, let's say, a biblical standard of sexual morality, you save sex for marriage. Marriage is for the sake of children. What you're finding is that a lot of those people, maybe they're initially opting into having children because they just want to get married. And that's kind of the way things work. They, they prize the value of children. But then what happens? This is the thing that I was so surprised by my interviews. It's having the child, maybe for reasons that are idealistic, that leads you to see that children are worth desire hearing.
- [49:33]
Alex Clark
You're saying there is a driving force that can overcome and incentivize people to have more kids. Despite the economy being trash, despite societal norms saying big families are weird or they're too difficult to manage. So what is incentivizing 5% of college educated American women to have five or more kids? What will persuade the next generation to give up their lives for their families?
- [50:00]
Katherine Hackl
So people, people choose paths that are self sacrificial for the sake of higher things. Right. So traditionally, you know, love of God, love of your spouse, love of your children, the kinds of things that would make you want to give up your life in general. Right? Because if you give up a treasured career or you, I mean, listen, most people don't have to give up their careers completely. It's just, you're accepting a little bit less of a go getter version. I mean, so I, I teach college and, and so I have a bit of a career, but is it the same one that I would have had if I had no children? I mean. No, of course not. We like to imagine without kids we'd be superstars. But actually I think a lot of us without kids would just be like kind of lazy. So that's a bit of a digression. But for sure you need higher things to get you to give up your self interest. And so that's, I expect in the future that however this demographic change plays out, we will see that we'll say living religious communities are places where people will still have children.
- [51:03]
Alex Clark
Did all of the women you talked to for the study always want a big family, always want children or were there some conversions?
- [51:11]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, that's great. I used to call them the converters at the beginning. I don't think I called them that in the book because it's a weird, weird like. But yes, there were a lot of people who came around to wanting children. I think a minute ago I said idealistic. So what I, what I heard a lot of was that. So people who maybe had religious conversions later in life, like Hannah, who I talked to, you meet first in the book, she has a great story. She was, you know, she went to a secular college, she's a secular Jewish. Just wanted to Figure out the meaning of life. Like, was doing transcendental meditation and crew dreadlocks and moved to Hawaii and like, sat on the beach.
- [51:46]
Alex Clark
Dreadlocks on the beach does not sound like who I would picture for this big family.
- [51:50]
Co-host
Mother, I love it.
- [51:51]
Katherine Hackl
That's right. And then she eventually somebody said, let's go to Israel. She went to Israel. Anyway, in Israel, met this very charismatic, I say living religious community, charismatic rabbi who had a number of children. And in that community, she also met her husband who also had dreadlocks and was searching for the meaning of life. And they just realized, you know, this is it. Like having children and, and becoming intentionally Jewish is the path to the meaning of life. Now notice that is not the same as like, I really want a kid the way people want a puppy. Like, they, they know it's, there's a lot of warm fuzzies and it's going to be great and rewarding. It was sort of a higher idealistic thing, like, this is how we want to organize our lives. But what happened to almost all the women I talked to was after committing to some idealistic vision of marriage and family, then, like, children are like, you learn about them and you go, oh, you know, actually, it's pretty much like much better than I expected. So that led often in this context of being open. You have a husband who's willing to consider having more than 1.6 children. You have a church that's going to bring you meals. Like, they don't think you're strange. So in that context where it's possible you have support from your husband and your family, maybe your church is supporting you, you go, do I really want another one? And you go, well, heck, yeah. Yeah, that was the best thing I ever did.
- [53:13]
Alex Clark
How is China looking right now? After many years of implementing a one child policy, they ended up reversing that decision, right? How come?
- [53:21]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, they reversed it because they saw that it was catastrophic for them. China. We're now two years into the official statistics. Chinese population is actually shrinking. Shrinking meaning there are less Chinese living people today in, in the country of China than there were last year. That's shrinking. Not that their growth rate is shrinking. The population is shrinking and most people are blown away by that. China saw that their one child policy was, you know, economically catastrophic for them. They tried to reverse it. They have not been able to reverse. I mean, they've not been able to encourage people to do what they, for so long told them not to do do. And so China's looking bad. I mean, they're looking bad in the way that many countries, I mean South Korea right now, the typical woman, we expect her to have 0.6, 0.7 at the upper bound. So China's really bad. Korea is really, really bad.
- [54:14]
Alex Clark
Are people in China still, even though the policy is reversed and you can have, I'm assuming you can have as many kids as you want.
- [54:20]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah.
- [54:20]
Alex Clark
So even though that's reversed, are people still kind of sticking to having only one they there?
- [54:24]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. So first it was the one child, then they, then it was like a two child policy phase. And now I think they're just trying to get people to change their minds and have kids at all. So I don't think they can get people to have two kids. So of course, what a lot of people say about China, we don't really know what's going on because we're not sure we can trust the official numbers. We're not really sure what the policies are. But yeah, I mean it turns out that culture matters a lot and so if you spend a lot of time, you know, I mean, that's just a terrible, a terrible episode. We blame China a lot and we should. This is a terrible, reprehensible regime that has just really annihilated its families and annihilated the will to live, I think for a lot of people. But we often let the west off the hook on that. There were demographers at elite universities in this country providing the scientific basis for the things on which the one child policy was built. So I just want to make sure I say that parts of our, we'll say academic elite elites in this country, they like this isn't new, that the academic elites are kind of telling the wrong story.
- [55:26]
Alex Clark
Okay, well this is perfect that you bring this up because what I was going to say one thing, that another juicy part of your book was one of the moms you interviewed, Kim. She said that she thinks American schooling tends to undermine families rather than support them. She said public schools are actually forcing premature separation between parents and children. Children.
- [55:47]
Katherine Hackl
That blew my mind.
- [55:48]
Alex Clark
That was so well said.
- [55:50]
Katherine Hackl
I know, I couldn't believe it. I could tell you, I can, I can imagine sitting in the back room of her church where she was telling me the story and I thought, you know, I've been largely very supportive of private schools and religious schooling, but in general, I haven't built up a whole theory about this. What did she say? She said that she feels that one of the things that's driving lower birth rates is that that schooling in general, but Especially the way we do public schooling forces an unnatural separation between parents and children and children from their siblings. And what that does is it makes the relationships less rewarding.
- [56:27]
Alex Clark
Wow.
- [56:27]
Katherine Hackl
And I was blown away by this. I thought, wait a second. Like, are you, are you saying what I think you're saying?
- [56:33]
Alex Clark
This is your second book.
- [56:34]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, this is the second book.
- [56:36]
Alex Clark
100% to be another book, another whole.
- [56:38]
Co-host
Thing on the American school system and.
- [56:39]
Alex Clark
How it's destroying families.
- [56:40]
Katherine Hackl
Exactly, exactly, exactly. And her whole thought was like, the child naturally feels rejected. And this reminded me of, you know, Susan Venker and a lot of the research we, we have about what it means to separate moms and children at a young age. And I thought, yeah, so what she's kind of saying is like, you drop off your 4 year old at, you know, whatever, preschool, pre K and then that's it. And like, initially that's very painful for the child, maybe even painful for mom. But we just kind of assume it's going to be normal. We get on with it. And then we're all scratching our heads saying, why is it so hard to be connected to my middle schooler? Why do I feel so Disconnected from my 6th grader, my 7th grader? I can't get my 8th grader to tell me stuff like what's going on. And what Kim was saying was, well, I mean, no, duh, this child's primary relationships have been shifted to the school relationships since a really young age. Oh. And you're like, oh, it just kills you, right?
- [57:35]
Co-host
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Katherine Hackl
Government? Heck yeah, people, let's freaking go.
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Co-host
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Alex Clark
Do you feel like there's no way out?
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- [59:20]
Alex Clark
Another woman who peaked my interest in the book was Mickey, a Japanese American who didn't want to have kids. Then she started having children. And you know, as you do, there's es and flows in marriage and, and she was, you know, really analyzing her marriage and, and things that cause stress. And she was like, is it all the kids that we've had that are causing the main source of stress from, or is it work? And she realized that it was work. She said that kids are what actually made her marriage better.
- [59:50]
Katherine Hackl
I heard this from so many people, and again, it wasn't something I was looking for. So there were things I tell you about in the book that were the things I asked them about. This wasn't something I was looking for. But so many people talked about it. They talked about the way in which children make your marriage better in ways that you didn't expect. What were the kinds of things people talked about? One is the language of your marriage becomes a kind of mission. Like, you've got this. So whether you're feeling up or down, like you said, ebbs and flows. Like, you know, you guys hate each other this week or, you know, next week, you're super in love again, because that's normal. But what sustains you in the down times, it's like, well, all right, we might not be talking to each other because I don't like what you said. You said this and I said this, and we're having a little thing, but you have to leave your bedroom and go downstairs and make breakfast for these people that you both love. And, you know, you kind of for the sake of the kids, you have to kind of keep going.
- [60:40]
Alex Clark
But then some people might be like, so what are you saying? That in order to save a failing marriage, you need to, you know, have a baby?
- [60:46]
Co-host
Because a lot of people advise against that.
- [60:48]
Alex Clark
So what would you say?
- [60:49]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't think children should be instrumentalized in that way. Right. So, and so. No, like, marriage is on the rock, on the rocks or something like that. No, like, you gotta work through your problems. The basic point here is not go out and have a baby to save a bad marriage. Marriage, you know. Well, I don't know if I'm advising against that or for it, but the basic point is that kids aren't going to ruin your marriage. Right? And this is the thing that people think about. They sort of think, like, there's a thing that you do, like, you fall in love and it's romantic and you go on a honeymoon and you have all this thing. There's like, you, there's who you are as a couple, and then the kids come along and, like, that's the end of you as a couple and it won't be romantic anymore and there's going to be like a baby in your bed. Like, that's not very romantic. And so there's this basic question about that. And so what I heard from a lot of the women was this story about how actually, because you come together to solve all these problems and then you grow. When you solve the problems, there's another piece of it, right? Like, so your husband rises to the occasion. So now he's the guy that doesn't just take you out on dates sometimes, but he also, like, he does the things that you didn't. You couldn't do. Like, I'm not a morning person. Well, my husband is a morning person. So when he gets up early and makes pancakes for the kids, now you have a new reason to be in love with your husband.
- [62:00]
Alex Clark
Oh, I love that.
- [62:01]
Katherine Hackl
How cool is that? Right? How cool is that? So I think for. For this, on this point about marriage and children, it's about correcting these terrible myths out there. And you'll see them. Every couple months, either Atlantic or VOX is going to run a piece about how, like, you know, kids changed everything. And not for the better.
- [62:17]
Alex Clark
It can't be all peaches and cream. Some of these mothers who have five or more kids, there has to be some downside. There has to be something inherently difficult that large families have to deal with, that small families don't deal with what did you find out?
- [62:32]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, I think the kinds of things that comes up, I mean it's, it's a, it takes a toll on your body, right? It's definitely objectively harder for your body to have eight than to have two. Right. So that comes up. But I think the thing that people talked about most is like kind of the chaos of the moment. Right. Like you've got three kids under three and you know what, that's super hard logistics, you know, just who's getting everybody someplace. I know in my family, I thought when the kids were little, like that was the hard time. But as you get to, you know, later in high school years, they've got activities and stuff, you're like, oh my goodness. It's still just logistically very difficult. You just have all these schedules, you miss stuff. I mean, just on my way here yesterday, you know, there was a kind of somebody didn't get to the dentist on the right at the right time. And so if you. It's not just one, it's going to be a bunch of dentist appointments. And so, yeah, so that's hard.
- [63:26]
Alex Clark
Recently I, I had this idea that maybe being an empty nester is a modern thing and that we were never supposed to be an empty nester. So I want to get your opinion on this because this just like occurred to me recently. Maybe we were supposed to have so many children, all these different age rages, that by the time the little one is leaving, the littlest one is leaving the house, you have these older kids who are starting to get married and then they're having kids and so then your home is filled with grandmother kids and that, that's the true cycle of life and how we're supposed to live. What do you think about that?
- [63:59]
Katherine Hackl
I think that's 100% right. I could say this. I'm a new grandma, so. Yeah, so exactly as of what, like three months? I think my granddaughter, you're like the.
- [64:09]
Alex Clark
Hottest grandma I've ever seen.
- [64:12]
Katherine Hackl
That's great. I love it. It's really, I mean, I've been saying for now, five years that it's such an unexpected delight to be in my 40s and have 20 something year old children. Why? Because they're these adults that are their own persons, they have their own interests and their own personalities and they're just not an extension of me. They are these like infinitely interesting, mysterious, wonderful human beings. But I happen to know them really well and weird. They lived in my tummy. So odd. You have to pinch yourself and you say, oh, you used to live inside my body. That's so wild. And it's such a great mystery. It's so cool. But yeah, to be in your 40s, I don't know why the 40s especially, but I feel still, and here are these adults that it's a special thing. It's like I've got friends and I've got these friends, children who are grown anyway, so then last year my first grown child got married and they had a baby right away.
- [65:08]
Alex Clark
And you still have. Your youngest is eight.
- [65:10]
Katherine Hackl
And so to your point. Yeah, a hundred percent. So that's how I hope the future. My husband said to me the other day, we have a generous sized house and we have. His mother lives with us. So she lives in the. In the basement apartment. And this is a wonderful gift to our children and to her. We love our life together. And my husband said to me, well, you know, in the long run, are we going to downsize when we don't need the extra apartment? And the sort of thing I said, are we. Are you kidding me? I don't want to downsize. I want to have whole rooms that are just sort of waiting for like our grandchildren to come with our grandchildren. And I think this is again, one of these sort of lost pieces of wisdom.
- [65:47]
Alex Clark
Or maybe you and your husband eventually go to that little part and then one of your other children takes over the whole house.
- [65:52]
Katherine Hackl
I think that's exactly right. I mean, this is part of this burden thing. Like, it's not a burden to live with other people. People. It's just a huge blessing. Wow. But it does. It's difficult, but the rewards are amazing.
- [66:05]
Alex Clark
What age, on average, did the women of large families start having children and then end having children?
- [66:10]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. Well, as you might imagine, the women that I talked to who had the bigger families, the tens, the nines and the tens and the elevens, they had gotten married pretty young, right after college or. Right. Even one like Terry had gotten married right before she finished college, had her first baby right around graduation time. And it's a great story. Uh, so. So some of them got married right at the end of college, and then others of them got married much later, like into their early 30s, and still fit in five kids.
- [66:37]
Alex Clark
Oh, that's good. I'm not married and I don't have kids. And I. And I desperately desire that. It just hasn't happened. It hasn't happened on God's timing. And so a lot of people ask, why do you cover these topics? How are you able to do these episodes? Because I'm you know, discussing openly and celebrating and, and promoting something that I don't have that I desperately want. But I, I think it's so beautiful and so important and for those is part of God's plan for their life in the season. I'm so happy to be able to be the vessel to bring this information to people and I feel like in this season that is what I'm meant to do. You said that you think elaborate maternity leave policies actually suppress the desirability of motherhood. How? In what? That is so anti everything that we've been told.
- [67:22]
Katherine Hackl
That's a bit spicy, isn't it? Yeah, the hot take. Yeah. I think I'm becoming known as the sort of person, person who thinks family is great, but I'm also against all these pro family things. Why?
- [67:31]
Alex Clark
How, how is that so.
- [67:33]
Katherine Hackl
And I'm not against pro family things. But yeah, I think we need it, we need to engage these things on a realistic level. I think it's a little bit like the schooling point. I think the point that Kim made about schooling writ large is, you know, it extends. Let me ask you this, do you think it's easier to leave your baby off in childcare at six weeks? Like say, say we're an old fam. Old fashioned maternity leave is maybe six weeks. You take six weeks off at six weeks, your kid goes into non maternal care somewhere. Is it easier to do that or to drop your kid off after a year? Say a longer maternity leave policy. Which one is harder? Now everybody's different. I can't speak to everybody's case but I will just say that for a lot of people it would be a lot harder to leave your baby at one. And I think the logic, people think about six weeks as being harder cuz it's so fresh now. Six weeks on your body is hard. You've just had a baby six weeks ago, everything's changed, you're not even recovered yet. So I get that piece of it. We would like to push maternity leaves out longer and I think if companies can do that and it makes sense for them and they want to use that to attract top female talent, that's all great. But will it make people want to have more children?
- [68:45]
Alex Clark
Kind of manipulative companies promoting that, that's the question.
- [68:48]
Katherine Hackl
And I think we just have to say, look, I don't care whether it's six weeks or one year. It's a really difficult thing to do. It's a very unpleasant thing to do. It's the sort of thing that if you had to do it. And God bless anybody who does have to do it. Lots of people do have to do it. If you can survive that, you're probably going to think, well, I got through it, but, man, I don't know if I want to do that again.
- [69:09]
Co-host
So what you're saying is there is.
- [69:11]
Alex Clark
No company that can implement something. There is no policy that can implement something. Something a woman has to want to put her kids first. Always, forever, until death. And that is. That is unbelievably countercultural. That is unbelievably, unpolitically correct. And yet it is the truth. And you're saying it.
- [69:32]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah, I think that is true. What it does mean, though, I mean, I think this is hopeful, right. So that sounded really extreme, right, what you just said. I think it's true and I think it's. It's good. And I think actually it's the sort of thing that leads to a lot of happiness and a lot of flourishing. But I also think it's hopeful. Right. Because you just. The way you just put it, you might have been like, well, anybody listening is just going to say, like, well, that's just too hard. But no, hang on, hold up. We can do hard things. We can do so many hard things. And actually the path to doing hard things is to get clear about what's true.
- [70:06]
Alex Clark
There's freedom in the truth.
- [70:06]
Katherine Hackl
There's freedom in the truth. Truth. And so for all kind of, oh, if we do this, more maternity leave, we do this, we do bigger tax credits. Those might all be good things to do for their own. For their own reasons, but they aren't going to cause people to want to put children first. Right. Or to reorganize their lives in these ways. What's the good news in this? Number one, that it's something we can know about as true. Number two, that actually that what's needed is a change of heart. It's a lot easier to change hearts than it is to change whole policies or whole cultures, actually. So I think there's good news in that. It's a kind of gospel of good news.
- [70:43]
Alex Clark
So the way to encourage women.
- [70:46]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah.
- [70:46]
Alex Clark
And men to want to have a big family and follow through on that isn't some magical law or anything. It's. It's. It's testimony of how it has been the best thing to ever happen to you, if you are someone that has a big family, is talking about it a lot.
- [71:01]
Katherine Hackl
A lot. I think telling the stories of our children is the most freeing and the most evangelizing thing we can do so to talk about it a lot. And we just think about the way knowledge changes so many other things. I think, like, we didn't know a lot about the way animals were treated in the production of our food supply in the past, or it was kind of hidden to us. And the more we learn about it, the more. More men and women all over the country say, I don't want to eat meat that was produced in that way. I didn't know about it. And now that I know about it, I'd be happy to pay a little bit more. Right. But it's. It's not a policy. It's getting that information out, talking more about it.
- [71:35]
Alex Clark
So true. When you put it that way. I mean, that's happened to me. That's happened to my audience in the last year and a half.
- [71:40]
Katherine Hackl
Yeah. And I would say it's happened to me in my own life in the last, you know, couple of decades. You know, little by little, you learn about something, you go. Your head explodes. You think they're doing this. Like, oh, my goodness, I didn't know that. I can never do that again. But the reason that's good news is because actually, like, little by little, people sharing the stories of their children, sharing the stories of. How did you know? What does it mean to get married when you're 22? Is it, like, weird or does it work? Is it great or is it bad? Will your life be over? Or will it actually be this thing where you build this marriage? That's amazing. So it sounds like a small thing, but I think it's like a big, big thing. And I think it's the kind of thing that drip by drip, we can hit a cultural tipping point. Right. Just like we've seen with a lot of other types of things, like who smokes anymore? So true. Right. Little by little, and then all of a sudden, it'll be flipped around and we'll think, like, oh, everybody gets that. This is good for us.
- [72:29]
Alex Clark
So, Katherine, what is your remedy for healing a sick culture?
- [72:33]
Katherine Hackl
I think we should try children. One of the things that was most maybe humbling that I heard on the road, listening to so many women, is so many of them talked about ways in which about 20% of the women I talked to talked about either they themselves or someone else in their family being unexpectedly actually cured or healed from some kind of really difficult time, ranging from a, you know, mental health problem, a depression, a difficult moment spiritually, physically, even. And the first time I heard it on the road, I thought, okay, that's A cool story like this lady had a baby and she wasn't, you know, she had a baby and her 11 year old was depressed. And then her 11 year old became not depressed because her 11 year old was holding this baby all the time. It was like a nice story. And then I went to another part of the country and I heard a similar story again. And then I heard someone tell me how her husband got over his father's death by the baby that they had. And I heard this over and over to the point where I thought, oh my gosh, who's studying this? Is anybody looking at the way in which babies can heal a culture? Can they heal a family? Can they heal a broken heart? And I thought, we have spent so much time thinking about how we have to box children in to this little phase of our lives. Are you done yet? Are you done yet? You get this all the time. Oh, you have. Those are nice kids. Are you done? And I don't know why we get it all the time. We box children in as if, like, if we had that extra kid, it would probably kill us or it's probably harmful to our health. People have asked me this, do you think that's good for you? What if the truth is something totally the opposite? What if the truth is that the thing that we need is exactly the thing we've boxed into this little corner and we've said like, nope, there it is. I'm gonna have my kids and be done and then I'm going to go on and do these other things. But what if the truth is that actually that's we've been, you know, let's say, aborting and isolating and family planning away. The exact thing that we need to get over depression, anxiety, feelings of loneliness, like that's a really shocking possibility. But a country that has been, let's just say, like living this. Living this lie about children for so long. It would be pretty awkward. Awkward. If that was the truth.
- [74:50]
Alex Clark
Naysayers are going to be like, so what you're saying all women should be barefoot, pregnant in the kitchen. And I'm going to go, yeah.
- [74:58]
Co-host
Okay. Remind us the name of your book again.
- [75:01]
Katherine Hackl
Hannah's children. The women quietly defying the birth dearth.
- [75:05]
Alex Clark
Cool. And we'll put the link to Katherine's book in the description. What is the best place to follow you on social media?
- [75:12]
Katherine Hackl
On social media, I'm on Twitter. X Cr Picasso. Instagram's not built yet, but stay tuned. I have the Instagram and yeah, that's where you can find me.
- [75:22]
Alex Clark
Perfect. Thank you so much, Katherine, for putting your heart and soul into addressing such a countercultural and largely ignored topic.
- [75:31]
Katherine Hackl
It's.
- [75:32]
Alex Clark
It's so refreshing. This was such a refreshing interview. Thank you.
- [75:35]
Katherine Hackl
You're welcome.
- [75:39]
Co-host
Hannah's Children was such a good nonfiction read. Probably one of my favorite nonfiction reads of the year. Am somebody that knows I would love, God willing to have a big family. So it was just fascinating to hear from these women who didn't necessarily have a conservative or Christian upbringing, which is of course the stereotype of people that choose to have large families. But they still saw so much value in raising multiple children. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern. No episode on Thanksgiving. So we will be back the Monday after Thanksgiving with a really cool and unique episode with a beauty lawyer. She sues the beau industry for toxins and chemicals that they put in their products. You are never going to think of some of the same brands at Sephora.
- [76:26]
Alex Clark
The same I'm just telling you.
- [76:27]
Co-host
Subscribe to Culture Apothecary wherever you get your podcasts. And of course real Alex Clark on YouTube. You can also watch on Spotify now they have video. Get merch@t merch.com use code Alex Clark for 10% off. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Apothecary.