AdminCommentators link America’s declining birth rate to a number of factors: a lack of support for mothers in the workplace, expensive childcare, delayed marriages and rising costs of living.
But what about women in the US who, despite these obstacles, have bucked the trend and managed to have all the children they want?
I count myself in that camp: I have eight children of my own. But I wanted to learn how other American women could achieve their desire to have children. So in early 2019, I decided to talk to some of the 5% of American women who have five or more children.
My recent book, “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,” is an account of what I learned.
The fertility gap
In April 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency that counts annual births in America, released its preliminary estimate of the total number of babies born in 2023.
At 1.62 expected children per woman – down from 3.8 in 1957 – the fertility rate is the lowest since the government started tracking it in the 1930s. Americans simply aren’t having enough children to replace themselves.
Studies have shown that without sufficient immigration to compensate for the loss, this will cause the population to shrink, which in turn can lead to economic stagnation, political instability and social fragmentation. But falling birth rates are accompanied by another troubling pattern: the so-called “fertility gap.”
The gap refers to the fact that women commonly report having fewer children than they planned to have when they were younger. In the US, women say that about 2.5 children are ideal, and that they realistically plan to have about 2.0 children. In the end they have 1.62, leaving a gap of about 0.4 to 0.9 children.
This discrepancy exists largely because women are marrying later than ever before in history—nearly 28 for the average American woman—which has pushed the average age of having their first child back to 30.
Despite the rosy rhetoric from influencers promoting child-free lives, this fertility gap can be a major problem – especially for women.
Having children is generally more important to women’s happiness than to men’s, and women are generally more affected by childlessness.
Low birth rates are therefore not only a crisis for societies and economies. They tell a deeply personal story about women who fail to achieve their goals for motherhood.
Against the trend
Motivated by these circumstances, I interviewed 55 women with five or more children living in all parts of the US, from the Pacific Northwest to the Carolinas and New England. Their homes were located in a range of socioeconomic areas, including the zip codes of the wealthy, middle class, and low-income. Some of them worked full-time, others were part-time employees, and some did not work at all. Their husbands had blue-collar jobs, white-collar jobs and everything in between.
What they had in common was religious faith – they belonged to Jewish, Catholic, Latter-day Saint, Evangelical and Protestant communities. They also tended to value having a large family over other things they could do with their time, talents, and money.
One woman I spoke to, a mother of five named Leah, has no regrets about having a large family. (The names used in my book are pseudonyms in accordance with best practices and federal regulations for the protection of human subjects in academic research.)
“I think our culture really values the kind of very rigid perception of success, and starts to devalue a mother’s contribution to society,” she told me. “It is almost radical and feminist to say that my contribution consists of healthy, balanced children. Coming from a divorced family was a great motivation for me to choose this life: the family unit came first over career and personal identity.”
The women who bucked the trend were not necessarily wealthier and did not appear to face lower costs of having children. Instead, they believed that children were a blessing from God and the main purpose of their marriage. As Leah said to me, “Every child brings a divine gift into the world that no one else can bring.”
Most of them ended up having more children because they valued having a large family so highly. They didn’t plan their family size around other life goals – they planned other life goals around having children. And the very high trade-off they placed on having children organized their priorities in a way that made it more likely for them to get married and have children, even while achieving career and financial milestones.
Wins and losses
Before my study, it was known that women who have more children than average go to church more often.
It was less understood why. Most churches today do not prohibit the use of contraception in marriage. None of the women in my sample reported having a large family because they believed family planning was wrong.
The economic theories of 1986 Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan helped me see the women I interviewed as rational actors like any other women—and not as blind followers of religious dogma.
According to Buchanan, people judge profits and losses by the choices they make. Anything that adds value to a line of action tips the scales in favor of that choice. Incentives do not have to be monetary. They can arise from ideas and beliefs, including religious values.
Conversely, anything that devalues an action makes it less likely. Negative incentives can be of a monetary nature, such as the price of a good. But the costs of missing out on other things can weigh even more heavily.
Tipping the scales
Whether the women I interviewed were rich or poor, they often mentioned the cost of missing out if they chose to have an additional child.
They gave up or set aside hobbies, professions, time for themselves and financial status – not to mention eight hours of sleep a night – when they decided to have more children.
They didn’t report that they didn’t like those things. They felt the sting of being misunderstood, overwhelmed and limited in their work options.
What stood out in the interviews was how much value they placed on having another child. They reached a higher number of children because they had something at the other end of the scale that outweighed the losses.
A mother named Esther summed it up: “The three great blessings we talk about in Judaism are children, good health, and financial support. I don’t feel like you could ever have too many of those things. These are blessings. They are God’s expression of goodness.”
Clearing the way
Based on these insights, my interviews suggested how mothers in my sample managed to defy the country’s declining birth rate and fertility gap.
First, because having a large family was so important to them, they purposefully pursued marriage. They chose colleges, churches, and social settings where others prioritized marriage, increasing the likelihood that they would find a partner in time to have children.
Second, they looked for partners who also wanted a large number of children. One mother, a devout Catholic, told us that she fell in love with a Protestant boy in college who wanted a large family. She knew what she wanted from her life partner.
Finally, the women who have overcome the fertility gap have adapted their careers to their desire to have children. They didn’t try to squeeze their children around professional milestones. As such, they tended to choose careers that were more flexible, such as teaching, nursing, graphic design or running a small business outside the home.
While not all Americans share the religious beliefs that shaped the women in my study, lessons from understanding their motivations can be of enormous value to the millions of young Americans aspiring to become mothers.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and trusted analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, Catholic University of America
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Catherine Ruth Pakaluk received funding from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University (2019, 2020), the APGAR Foundation (2022), and the Ortner Family Foundation (2022) to conduct the research and preparation of the book mentioned in this article.
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