Lessons From Large Families Defying The Collapsing Birth Rate with Dr. Catherine Pakaluk
The Family Teams Podcast
Jeff Bethke
4.8 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Birth rates are declining rapidly across the Western and developed world.
Yet...there are still families out there having 5+ children, completely defying modern trends.
What encourages someone to have a large family?
How do we promote the benefits and joys of having a lot of kids?
What does it mean for the future of our country and our world?
In today's episode, Jeremy dives into this topic with economist and author, Dr. Catherine Pakaluk of the Catholic University of America, to discuss her work on the subject, specifically her book Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying The Birth Dearth.
On this episode, we talk about:
0:00 Intro
1:01 Why Write A Book About Mothers With 5+ Children
5:35 Why Women Choose To Have More Children
8:04 How Do Lawmakers React To Such A Faith-Focused Finding?
14:21 A Purpose So Strong You Can Withstand Anything
24:18 Individual vs Team Mentality in Family
31:04 Roles in Family
36:30 The Healing Power of an Infant
41:48 The Benefit of Having Older Kids Around Young Siblings
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Resources Mentioned:
Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying The Birth Dearth by Catherine Pakaluk: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684514576/
Catherine Pakaluk Website: https://pakaluk.com/
Family Plan Calendar: https://shop.familyteams.com/products/family-plan-calendar
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Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast! Our goal here is to help your family become a multigenerational team on mission by providing you with Biblically rooted concepts, tools and rhythms! Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke. Make sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube so you don't miss out on future episodes!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Childbearing, having children is one of the available forms of human excellence. |
| 0:06.0 | And it can be pursued, right, as a form of excellence. |
| 0:10.0 | In the same way that someone could be a mountaineer or a great NBA player parenting is a unique kind of excellence. |
| 0:17.0 | And then once you get there, of course, you realize, well, this is an excellence available to everybody if they choose to see it that way. |
| 0:25.6 | Hi, welcome to the Family Teams podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational |
| 0:31.5 | team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. |
| 0:37.1 | Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. |
| 0:43.1 | Hey, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited today to be joined by Catherine Pekolic. |
| 0:49.0 | Catherine wrote a book, this amazing book. I'm going to put it up here on the screen for you guys on YouTube. |
| 0:54.1 | Hannah's children, the women quietly defying the birth dearth. |
| 0:59.0 | Catherine is a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:03.7 | So you guys who follow the podcast know that there's few things that fascinate me more than |
| 1:07.7 | trying to understand what is happening to sort of fertility. How do we think |
| 1:12.7 | about the decision to have children and how that has been changing? And so what this book does is |
| 1:18.9 | it goes, Catherine does a ton of research and interviews women who have five or more children. |
| 1:24.7 | And so, Catherine, I look for you just to describe a little bit about the thesis of the book. Like, what brought you to want to write this book and then, yeah, |
| 1:30.8 | give everyone kind of the big picture of what you were studying. Right. So the premise of the book, |
| 1:38.0 | we've got this kind of crisis, an economist, right? So it's crisis of low birth rates. |
| 1:42.6 | Economists have been studying birth rates for a long, long time. |
| 1:45.0 | And in some sense, you could say it's a pretty bread and butter issue for economists. And you think of someone like Thomas Malthus, you go back to, you know, things like economics of doom and gloom. |
| 1:55.0 | Yes. |
| 1:56.0 | And, you know, usually people like Malthus, you know, we think about economists being kind of paranoid or obsessed with there being too many people. |
... |
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