Hannah's Children

The Stories of Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

By: Catherine Pakaluk

Narrated by: Jaimee Draper

Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

A portrait of America's most interesting yet overlooked women.

In the midst of a historic "birth dearth," why do some 5 percent of American women choose to defy the demographic norm by bearing five or more children? Hannah’s Children is a compelling portrait of these overlooked but fascinating mothers who, like the biblical Hannah, see their children as their purpose, their contribution, and their greatest blessing.

The social scientist Catherine Pakaluk, herself the mother of eight, traveled across the United States and interviewed fifty-five college-educated women who were raising five or more children. Through open-ended questions, she sought to understand who these women are, why and when they chose to have a large family, and what this choice means for them, their families, and the nation.

Hannah’s Children is more than interesting stories of extraordinary women. It presents information that is urgently relevant for the future of American prosperity. Many countries have experimented with aggressively pro-natalist public policies, and all of them have failed. Pakaluk finds that the quantitative methods to which the social sciences limit themselves overlook important questions of meaning and identity in their inquiries into fertility rates. Her book is a pathbreaking foray into questions of purpose, religion, transcendence, healing, and growth—questions that ought to inform economic inquiry in the future.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2024 Catherine Pakaluk (P)2024 Oasis Audio

Great family values

This book has encouraged me to truly pursue my dream of being a mother. I highly encourage this book to any women who have the inkling towards motherhood. Great listen!

A brilliant, pathbreaking book

A fresh approach to the catastrophic decline in fertility. It focuses not on why women do not have babies but on why some - educated with shining paths to career and material success choose to buck the trend and have large families. it explores their reasons of head and heart by allowing them to tell their own stories. Pakaluk as an economist and social scientist illuminates how these stories cast light on the futility of current public policy efforts to reverse the birth dearth. She proposes a better approach.

Fascinating!

I liked the explanation of the desires of the heart. The interviews with the women. So well done!

Propaganda dressed up as research.

I had assumed this book was based on actual scientific research. Rather, the author confuses research with anecdotes and reveals her obvious bias and tendency to oversimplify complex social phenomena. She has a caveat about being “blessed” with 8 children and that she knows her work might be triggering or upsetting to individuals with fewer or no children. She even claims an N of one is somehow valid research. Hoo boy!
If you want to feel justified in wanting or having a big family, maybe read this. She only offers a limited perspective from an entirely unrepresentative sample, so maybe don’t read it unless you are one of these rare, super rational wonder women with means to support a large family,

Have large family watch children raise each other?

I'm glad I read it, but what a painful read. I do have to wonder who was caring for the six surviving (one died as a baby) children of her husband while his first wife was dying of cancer and what lead to his dying wife picking out the undergrad for his next wife while he worked twelve hour days. Story after story followed of women whose children had the exact opposite of helicopter parents -- and not surprising when the ratio of adults to children is as low as pictured. Having large families is supposed to promote dying to self and learning to be unselfish. Particularly hard to read was the account of the disabled child whose medical care "flip him over!" was performed by his siblings for whom support staff were available but those added adults were waived off as unneeded.

What wasn't mentioned was starkly visible. Although there are accounts of disabled children, there is not one single tale of what to do when a child has a need because of giftedness. There is also little mention of father involvement, with the exception of a sole full-time dad of fifty five cases. There is next to no mention of supporting external activities, and none of group family activities.

This looks to be a life of suffering and extreme loneliness for the woman who is giving birth in the situation, especially since three or four children is seen to be "the hardest number" as the children all learn to depend on each other and the bulk of the actions that would be done by an alloparent, parent or other leader end up in the task list of the children. There's much conveyed on how we need more humans on the planet, but I truly fear living in a world made up of children raised by children in this way.

My friends reading this are probably very surprised by my review, because I picked this up because I wanted a very large family, many of my friends have succeeded in having large families, and especially if you include in the definition fostering and other alloparenting situations, many families (including mine) are far larger than the family groups portrayed.

This is how to do large families wrong, not what I wanted at all. It's more or less the flip side to Scary Little Gods. Yes, motherhood is lifelong but I would make a lot of changes if this was my blended family of 7+8 children total.