They Will Replace You: What Drives Them? (With Catherine Pakaluk of Hannah's Children)

Join us in an inspiring conversation with Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a professor of economics at Catholic University, and author of 'Hannah's Children'. Catherine, a mother of 14 (8 biological and 6 adopted), shares her experiences of motherhood, the purposefulness behind having many children, and insights from her qualitative research on mothers with large families. We discuss the controversy surrounding the book, factors influencing high fertility rates, and the cultural and policy implications of promoting intentional childbearing. Catherine also provides practical advice on parenting, gender roles in large families, and the surprising joys and challenges of raising many children.

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. We are so excited to be joined today by one of my favorite people in the entire world and inspiration to me. Catherine Ruth. She is a teacher.

She's a professor of economics at Catholic University, but more importantly to me, she's author of Hannah's Children, the book that changed my mind from wanting seven kids to 10 plus kids. It got me so excited about it. So we're thrilled. We're thrilled to have you on and we're very keen. to ask you some questions, both about the book, but also about being a super mother.

I mean, you've had, you're the mother to 14 children, eight of them that you've given birth to. It's just insane, like, that you're living this, this dream. Just to clarify, you have

Malcolm Collins: 14 children. But that gives you a lot of data points.

Catherine Pakaluk: That is true.

Simone Collins: So the first thing we were curious as we were prepping for our conversation with you and just wondering is when you published Hannah's Children, which is a book in which [00:01:00] you really share academic research where you did qualitative interviews with.

Mothers who had more than five Children or five or more Children, I should say. When you released the book or even when you were doing the research what was the most controversial thing that came up or the place where you got the most pushback or bristling?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, probably. If you want to know the truth, probably the fact that I limited my sample that college educated women.

Yeah,

it's just interesting because a lot of people wanted to you know, number one, you know, are you sort of saying that the only way to be like a full human being is to have a college education, which is funny because I'm like on the other end of this I I'd be. More inclined to say, like, we've done too much college in this country, and we need to kind of free up the education market, free up the credentialing market.

But so that was something that came up a lot as a kind of pushback was like, you know, you're, you're, you're zeroing in on sort of this a special group of people, right? Because it's not, it's not everybody. Why did you

Malcolm Collins: choose College Educated Women?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, well, I did, because that's where in the data, we really see [00:02:00] this the, the, the correlation most strongly, right?

So the more education people, women and countries have, the fewer children they have. So you see what I mean? So you kind of want to figure

Simone Collins: out this post globalization, post female empowerment world. You're totally right. It's one of the things we were just recording an episode about. was how we can't go back, how researchers have found that, for example, giving men more economic empowerment relative to women actually doesn't increase marriage rates.

You know, so like, yeah, no, okay. That makes sense. Now I get it.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. That was the reason. And of course I wrote the book really for a general audience, a very wide audience. And so I didn't want to, I didn't. Use a lot of space to make that case. It's like, it's like a couple of sentences. And then people ask me later and they're like, Oh, you know, they didn't even read those two sentences.

And they, they think like, it's really elitist to just talk to college educated women. I'm like, I didn't have a lot of space here guys, but I did, you know, I did go, I did. Intentionally, from my sample of people who applied to be interviewed, I did grab women from kind of all parts of the [00:03:00] socioeconomic spectrum.

So, I mean, you know, there are women who have college degrees who aren't living it up and just to

Malcolm Collins: make sure you got some that were poverty and you kept some on who wanted to get PhDs and work in academia.

Catherine Pakaluk: 100%. There you go. You nailed it. Like my best friends. Yeah, that's right.

Malcolm Collins: So question here. What surprised you most of the like findings or the commonalities in these women maybe that differentiated from your own experience or that affirmed your own

Catherine Pakaluk: experience?

Yeah. Good question. Let me see. So, I think this is going to sound funny, but you know, the first piece that kind of confirmed my experience was that like, people have reasons for what they're doing. I mean, I know this is like the whole, you know, this is something you guys talk about all the time.

You represent this in a lot of ways. For so many people. And I think that's so cool. Which is like, we don't end up with a lot of kids. We just don't know how that happens, right? Like, obviously like we go to great lengths to make it happen. It's something that you could with a college education or whatever else.

A lot [00:04:00] of other things you could do with your time. You could choose it on purpose. So, so that like I, my hunch going into it was like, women are purposeful. Couples are purposeful. They're not accidentally having kids. We all pretty much know how this happens at this point. And like birth control isn't that expensive.

So, so why did you do this? So, you know, but again, in a sense, it was a hypothesis. I had to, it had to come out of the research, which was like, yeah, people have reasons and they can say what they are. That was great. So that really confirmed my experience. You know, I, I, like I say in the first chapter, I know when any, every one of my kids was conceived and I could have avoided it.

Right. So there has to be like a story there. Like, what were you thinking? Yeah, so that was a big thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, there's a theory that I've been building that's related to this and we were gonna go over it at the pronatalist conference But it said all kids come into existence for one of three reasons one is a Parents are practicing Jesus take the wheel basically You know, they get pregnant when they get pregnant.

They keep the kids. They keep [00:05:00] the second category is the parents wanted a child and then did what they needed to to bring that child into existence. And then the third case is the kid was conceived accidentally and the parents then, then kept the kid. And when you're looking at pronatalist interventions, Pretty much every form of pronatalist intervention only affects now we can put the Jesus take the wheel families in a different category because they're ones so rare and already high fertility, but of the other two categories, every pronatalist intervention you can do only affects one category.

So, for example, banning pornography, banning contraception, banning abortion, all of these increase the accident kids. Whereas economic factors, increasing house sizes all of that stuff, that affects the intentional kid category. And that It's something that we can be really intentional about as we build out policy, but also to bring focus to the fact that if you look at where Children are disappearing in the United States, [00:06:00] we pointed out on a lot of podcasts, you really only see a drop in the Children.

The number of Children and women under 24 in the other categories is either growing or staying steady. And to me that represents a likely accident kids in any time recently. So what actually is causing the existing fertility crash is a disappearance of this accident category of baby. And the best way to resolve this is to increase intentionality around having Children and build more.

And I'm wondering how you would think about doing that. You've seen so many families that made this decision.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Well, I mean, so if I understand you correctly, you're saying like in a sort of move people from the accident category into the intentionality category, which is like totally possible to do.

I think I mean, first of all, I talked, so, so I mean, just, we can't underscore enough, like, I love the, I love the way you guys are thinking about this and it tracks a little bit with some of the things I'm hoping to present at the natalist. Are you guys going to person? Yeah. Or we're not. Great. This is going to be fun.

Catherine Pakaluk: Using the code word [00:07:00] NATALISM. ORG or just look up NATALCON, , you can get discount tickets using the code COLLINS, all caps.

It's March 28th and 29th this year in Austin. So, just coming up.

So it tracks a little bit with the, how I'm trying to formulate things. But right. If people have reasons for what they're doing, then they, and they can say what those reasons are. And they're not like hard to understand. Well, then, you know, that, that should inform our policy tremendously. It should have a huge impact on our, on our policy.

That's the first thing. Second thing is. I talked to a ton of people who didn't, like, grow up wanting to have kids in or not wanting to have, like, more than, you know, two kids or one, one kid, 1. 5 kids. So, so people can be persuaded, they can change their mind. And, and that's like, that's like the most normal thing in the world.

So, so a hundred percent, like our focus has to be on kind of like what defines this intentionality category, where it comes from. Where, how, what manner of educating kids is likely to perpetuate that? Because this has a lot to do with what, you know, in the policy world would think of as preference formation, you know, kind of, [00:08:00] or somebody else might just say, like, your beliefs, like, what do you believe about things?

So, that's more of just a way of underscoring the importance of the question.

Simone Collins: Well, I want to dig into this actually, because we. Sort of offline discussed the, a little bit of the way wise change, like often young parents start off wanting kids, or even a lot of kids for one reason, and they sort of build their plan, but then like, there's a totally different driver, and I feel like there's a pretty different way significant disconnect between all of the whys of high fertility families and then most of the policy focus, like I should ask, like, did any of the families that you're interviewing that you interviewed before that you're considering intervening in the future say like, Oh, well, you know, I got a little more money and so then we decided we should have a big family.

https: otter. ai

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Okay. So, well, I'll get to schooling in a minute. I mean, probably the number one thing was like, I really enjoyed my kid. Right. And that sounds like so simple. It's so ordinary. And yet you don't hear that as much. You don't [00:09:00] hear this sort of these sort of stories. I mean, I would want to merge that and say, like, there's kind of an interaction effect between I really enjoyed being with my kid and some kind of arrangement where people had the freedom to say, well, I'm really enjoying this kid.

And yeah. I could just do this full time. I mean, so that there's something there like the woman who gave up being a doctor because she just actually turned out to hate being a doctor.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Catherine Pakaluk: but presumably her husband made enough money and they could just keep having babies. So there was this. I mean, I do think the enjoyment or the experience of having kids was a big factor for a lot of people.

Then you have to ask that question. How early do you have to have that first kid to kind of yeah. Realize this like, oh, I really do like this and I'd like to do this again and again. Yeah, probably for most people That's going to be like in your 20s.

Malcolm Collins: Did you have any examples of husbands who convinced their wives and what arguments worked?

Catherine Pakaluk: Well, I had one like famous case and it was so famous and so bizarre that it like it had to be a chapter in the book. It was kind of the exception that proved the rule. Because actually right of 55 people I interviewed, there was only one [00:10:00] case of all the 55 of what I would call husband led childbearing.

And it was the least religious couple in my sample. So that I think is kind of fun and mind blowing a little bit. These were not like a bunch of religious families where the husband was like, more, more, more, you know, tribe, established tribe no, it was the least religious couple. And you know, I don't know a lot about him.

It'd be great to go back and interview him. What I do know is what I can say is that he was a, he was a faculty member at a, at a really elite school. And I won't say the state because that will, it won't help. So, you know, he's a really successful, talented person, his wife so dual PhD couples.

When they met and they first started dating he said to her right away, like, I want nine kids, you know, and actually she learned about it first through his mom and she's like, why? You know? And I guess. I guess part of the point about, like, he's really bright, and he was a bodybuilder, and has a gym in the basement, and you're like, okay, does he just, he thinks he's got, like, he's, he's, he's, he likes his life, he likes who he is, and he wants to have more of himself.

They, they [00:11:00] didn't describe themselves as especially religious. They did identify as Jewish, but she said really clearly that Jewish part is separate from the having kids part, whereas all the other Jewish women I interviewed would have said, no, no, no, like, of course, this is like the fulfillment of our religious beliefs.

Right. And so how did he succeed? I mean, he just, he just said he really wanted these kids. And The way she put it, I drilled down. I'm like, look, if you don't want the kids, how do you keep going along with this? She said, it's really hard to make it sound like he's not a dick. Like this is what he says.

And he's like, but she's like, they have this great marriage. They're really they're really into each other. And she said, you know, and this is. I think really telling, and it kind of reminds me of something that our friend at MoreBirths the, the ex account MoreBirths says she said, you know, he doesn't ask for much.

He, he doesn't want me to cook for him. He does his own laundry. He doesn't, this is like the one thing he really wants for me. We have a great marriage. And so like, why would, why wouldn't I just want to give that to [00:12:00] him? And so that sounds like in a way so old fashioned.

Malcolm Collins: I make her have lots of kids and she cooks for me and she cleans and she makes our money because I'm a feminist, full empowerment

Simone Collins: on my part.

That's interesting though, because we also didn't come from a religious background and Malcolm was the one that led the interest in fertility. See, that is

Catherine Pakaluk: interesting.

Simone Collins: And then I,

Catherine Pakaluk: well, I do, I do kind of wonder if there's part of this like secular, right. This like emerging secular, right. Which you guys are.

Certainly representative of in some sense. Nobody's representative of anything at the day, right? We're

Malcolm Collins: certainly mixing in there An episode on this in the near future one of our fans who sometimes collects data collected data in utah that was really interesting He was looking at fertility rates of mormons and voting patterns and he found some really interesting stuff in this study but one of the things that I found particularly interesting is that if You divide counties by you know, Mormon voted [00:13:00] Trump, Mormon voted against Trump, non Mormon voted Trump, non Mormon voted against Trump.

Non Mormon voted Trump has the same fertility rate as Mormon voted against Trump. So voting for Trump is as impactful for your fertility rate as being Mormon.

Catherine Pakaluk: Mormon in Utah.

Malcolm Collins: So Trump's

Simone Collins: solution to the birth rate. Get

Malcolm Collins: on my team. It'll fix the problem. Fixing may be more of a thing than people realize in terms of the vitalism.

You know, one thing I was wondering was because what I see with a lot of people, like my anecdotes, when I ask families who wanted to have a lot of kids and didn't end up having a lot of kids is it's always, well, they had that one really bad pregnancy scare or something like that. Could you run into that frequently?

Were these families who just didn't have that happen or did they have it happen and they kept going?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. That's a good question. And actually I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to come back to this. Like, well, what, what, what, what kept them going? What was the why? And oftentimes it was really enjoying that first baby.

And so, yeah, these aren't people who had like the [00:14:00] nightmare experience with their first kid. And so the first point is like, Yeah. Your experience with kids actually highly influences like whether you have more kids. Like that's a really, which kind of brings us back to like, well, what are those experiences?

Do you feel as one of the women said, like alone in a box,

Simone Collins: we

Catherine Pakaluk: send people home from the hospital. They are alone in a box with their baby.

Simone Collins: Yeah, basically a good way

Catherine Pakaluk: to put it. Actually, that's true. No wonder. No wonder you wouldn't want to go back to that. For sure. So were there no bad experiences? I would say there were a couple of bad experiences.

Where people kept going. Of course, I don't know the counterfactual. There could be, you know, bazillions of people who were potentially like multi parity people who had a terrible experience and didn't go on to have children. And I never interviewed them because that wasn't part of my study design.

But I did interview a few people who had bad experiences at the beginning. Postpartum depression. Tough kids, that sort of thing. But the description there was kind of like, we really believed what we were doing when to keep going. And at some point it leveled off. So there was also this kind of interesting idea about like three was the [00:15:00] hardest number of kids to have.

And that, you know, if you, if you kept going and got that far, like after that, it was kind of like, there wasn't that much else to, to learn. It's like, it sounds like weird, but yeah, that was.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, that's why after three, well, really after four economies of scale kicks in, and I guess with you, you like came in with economies of scale, like suddenly, like you became mother to six children.

Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: Economies of scale. But I think there's another piece, which is you know, like one mom said something like, well, I hate, you know, she said something, I feel really bad for the people who give up after two, because like, now you're good at this. And so there's this idea that like, there's a skill to be learned.

And if you take that 10, 000 hours concept.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I

Catherine Pakaluk: actually haven't worked it out. How many kids do you have to have to do 10, 000 hours of parenting? That's a quick question. Gosh, like, actually not that much, like, you're, you're, you're,

Simone Collins: a couple of years in you're.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. You're probably pretty close, right?

Simone Collins: Even if you're not doing a whole lot of childcare. Yeah. Right.

Catherine Pakaluk: Cause unlike the other skills, you have to like go out and do them. For a few hours a day, whatever that is like to 10 years over a few hours a day. But anyway, I mean, [00:16:00] just take that concept. I think this is a big piece of our culture is that people think of parenting as a binary condition.

Like you're, you're our parent or you aren't a parent. But there's such a thing as being like a better parent and a worse parent. And actually I think that's why people don't like to talk about it. Cause it seems like you're criticizing people like, Oh, you're, you don't even, you don't have much experience, but actually we've got to talk about parenting as a skill in part because it's great news.

it means that actually you can get better at it.

Simone Collins: True. Yeah. Speaking of parenting as a skill, I mean, you are, yeah, you've done a lot of it. I'm very curious to hear what one you would say is most misunderstood about being in a large family, a parent in a large family. And, and two things that you learned after having a lot of kids where you now like.

When you meet someone who's becoming a first time parent or they're about to start their family, you're like, let me hit this off.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Maybe I'll go backwards. Things that I want to head off at the, I'm like, I look back, especially with my last few kids and I'm like, [00:17:00] wow, I didn't need all this stuff.

Like all that stuff, like those, you know, the babies, you got all like four different kinds of strollers and baby seats. And I just didn't know. Right. All the stuff I really. Maybe there's no way to prevent that, but I think part of it is like at the beginning you feel like, it's like the crash test dummies, you feel like you need to sort of, everything has to be protected and it needs a tool or a machine.

My last couple kids I just had like a thing I threw, like a backpack or a thing and I just, the car seat never left the car, I didn't tote things around. I hardly use strollers to be honest. Same actually. Yeah, I mean, maybe because I don't live in a city, but you know, mostly if I went out with my kid on foot, I would carry the kids.

So, I found baby wearing to be really something that freed me up to do a lot of things. You have your hands when you're, yeah, when you're wearing your baby.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean,

Catherine Pakaluk: I used to teach classes with the baby on my back, which was great. Anyway, so I think there was a sense in which when I was younger, like, there's just a lot of stuff.

And like, I carried a huge diaper bag at the beginning. And then later it was like, I don't think I [00:18:00] need more than. Two items and I can stick them in something else. You know my pocket like there's a diaper and a and a onesie in my pocket I'm good to go, right? It's a good pocket that that goes against the

Simone Collins: female conspiracy against pockets,

Malcolm Collins: but I

Simone Collins: know

Malcolm Collins: here's a question What are your thoughts on advice to people who are dating to attempt to find a partner who wants a lot of kids?

Yeah,

Catherine Pakaluk: well, you definitely have to be up front right and I think people have to like have to match on that from the beginning. I don't, I don't know. I guess I've known a few cases where it was like, surprise. I really, but I feel like that ought to be like very high on the profile. Oh yeah. Right. It could kind of cut through a lot of stuff.

I suppose people don't want to like reduce the pool or something, but fundamentally that's what you have to do is reduce the pool.

Simone Collins: You get to know sooner if you filter them out earlier. Otherwise you've just wasted two weeks or more. Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Cause I think if you don't have kids, I mean, right. If you don't, If you don't have kids, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a pretty big sell.

I mean, it's a, it's a, something you really have to kind of [00:19:00] get through. But yeah, that's my number one thing with my, my own kids that are dating my college students. You're like, you, you, like my son dated a girl in the fall and they met on hinge and, you know, and you're like, Did you know, do you know if she wants kids, you know, three weeks in, you know, it's like, Oh, it's not going to work out.

And you're like, that's what it was. Wasn't it

just

kids, right? It's like, well, cause if anybody will say you want kids, maybe you have to be more specific. It's like, I want to get married to start a family like right away because that'll scare them off really quickly. Yeah.

Simone Collins: No, would that have scared you off Simone?

Well, on our second date, Malcolm was like, I want to have a lot of kids, but I didn't say right away. I didn't say right away. Well, it was on the second date. It was on the second date. Yeah, it was after and it wasn't like the first conversation. I think it's a good second date subject. Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. You don't want to let it go.

You don't want to let it go too far. Yeah. There's some chemistry and attract. Yeah. I mean, yeah. But I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, obviously, like, look, churches do this for people. And so there's a lot of this happening in churches where you don't [00:20:00] have to be explicit, like you're both, you're part of some tiny traditionalist group.

And you know, like everybody in this church already agrees that this is what we're going to do when we get married. And then you don't have to have all those conversations. But I think if you're just dipping into the big pool and a dating app or whatever, you're going to have to get it out there quickly.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. That's fair.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So at the beginning I interrupted you, you were going to say the second thing that you thought was interesting in the pool of people that you had or surprising to

Simone Collins: you. That surprised you about the

Catherine Pakaluk: interviewees? Right. Well, I guess this was interesting. I guess. Well, I don't know.

Like, I'm, I'm familiar with Catholics. I'm Catholic. But I interviewed women of a bunch of different religious backgrounds and beliefs, and I didn't really know what the story was going to be. And I think what surprised me was to find out that while religious identity was strong in most of my interviewees, except for that one, that one couple what surprised me was how I don't know.

Way to go, baby. Is he drinking? She's drinking the beer. Yeah, basically. Just Malcolm. That's so cute. It's a girl, right? [00:21:00] She's a girl. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, what surprised me was actually like how non credal the common sort of religious factors were. Meaning they were Kind of common across all of these different Jewish and Christian groups who shared the same, you know, or, or partially share the same scriptures.

So this kind of like thing that you can say in a, in a, in sort of non religious terms that children are blessings, I guess it's a religious term of like a blessing. But you know, it wasn't like, well, the Mormons have this One idea. And then the Jewish women had a totally different idea and that it was really linked to their specific religious creeds.

It was pretty general. And so I think that was interesting. So I, I've started to think and, and by the way, what was the content of that? It was this, we, we might call it pronatal belief. I know that's what some people like to call it or like a conviction that children are, are really important, worth having.

Yeah. And I think what that drove me to think, and I'm, I'm really kind of [00:22:00] thinking about this going forward, looking at the social science of religion. I mean, you've seen this Pew study that was out this week about how like Christianity stopped falling. I guess the number of people who identify as Christian stopped falling.

It's not exactly like it's rising, but it's stopped falling, like that's what Ryan Burge is calling it. Like maybe we hit the floor of and so. I think that the study of religion, the scientific study of religion in this country has got to move past like just these denominations. Like, that's as much as we do.

We just sort of survey. And what I'm finding is there's this like minority group in all these different religious groups that has this very strong we could say biblical set of principles or beliefs about the value of having children, but And if you want to know who's having kids, you, it's like, that's who you have to find.

It's like the 5 percent of Mormons and the 5 percent of Catholics and the, and so it's religious. It is religious for those people, but you couldn't find them just by finding out who's religious. You'd have to dig into, so it's like intersect the being religious [00:23:00] with this specific belief. Like, so it's like, what kind of religion?

Did you find any

Simone Collins: unifying, was it that they also lived in really high fertility communities? Like were there correlatory factors that seem to indicate like, okay, so this is, this is what makes them that 5 percent of Mormon or Catholic or whatever it may be that is really high fertility.

Catherine Pakaluk: Well, I'd be hesitant to draw a strong conclusion from my relatively small sample, which wasn't representative but I did have like all kinds.

I mean, I did have people who did live in these smaller communities, but a lot of times, like, they went to move near them. So they already, they got this belief, or they became convinced of this. And then that's why they sought out the community. So the causality went in the other direction. It's true. I had one lady who moved to a, because of a school and then met a bunch of people and was like, okay, I can keep going.

But then you've got the couple in chapter seven and they just are like opening the Bible and they feel like, you know, they're Jesus take the wheel types. And and they just are off by themselves at their own church in the Rocky mountains. So I think we need to do more [00:24:00] research on that. I think there were certainly cases where clearly the orientation or belief was coming out of how they were, how they had been.

Educated how they've grown up and that's a piece that's relatively understudied. So it's something we can take to the data in the next couple of years and kind of ask like what, what types of schooling most predict higher, higher birth rates. Mike, like my hunch would be, we'd see a lot of homeschooling, we'd see a lot of private independent schools, like micro schools, co ops, things like that.

That'd be my hunch, but I haven't asked the data yet.

Simone Collins: Yeah, we're really, we'd love to see more research on that too. And he's like, in terms of,

Malcolm Collins: oh, go ahead, you're talking about the, the idea of these high fertility sub factions of these religious communities is, is participation in them intergenerational?

Like does it persist with fidelity or do they deconvert to the other type of Christian within this community? Have you seen?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: That well, that's the question. There's been a little bit of work on [00:25:00] intergenerational transmission of values in in that I looked at in in European data, but my problem with that data, because it would it would it would argue that basically like religious groups don't pass on their values like particularly well, but I would argue that the thing that they're not looking at is the.

Beliefs of the groups like it's not granular enough. Because some people clearly are. And so, you know, you just need to get more granular. What type of religious group is it? And then how do they educate their kids? We know that sort of alternative schooling isn't that common in Europe. So. If I were to guess I would say that that's the missing link.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I I don't know I actually i'm gonna push back here I think that a lot of people who are from religious backgrounds when they see things like the rate of religion stabilizing or growing what they think it is this family's getting better at keeping their kids within the religion and what it actually is is people training new types of religion that are radically different from their parents version of christianity.

Yeah and i've seen increasingly poor [00:26:00] rates of keeping kids, especially within the incredibly conservative iterations of religions. One of the things I was telling Simone recently, I didn't know is apparently, and I've got to look for more information on this, but the F. L. D. S. The F. L. D. S. R. FLDS are the most extreme.

Those are the Mormons that have like multiple wives and dress kind of frumpy. Apparently they just held their third gay pride parade this year.

Speaker: Two towns on the Utah Arizona border with deep roots in the FLDS Church will celebrate pride this weekend. Jenna BreE shows us how queer people are openly showing their colors.,

Speaker 2: An area known for its polygamous community and ties to the fundamentalist LDS Church,

Speaker 3: the history of the town.

Um, you know, I feel like it kind of gets a bad rep.

Speaker 2: Last year, Short Cr in the fourth of july par they plan on marching wit again this year.

.

Malcolm Collins: Like we're seeing within the most extreme factions of these religion communities, they're losing [00:27:00] young people to woke like at a way higher rate. Which is really shocking.

It's not what I would expect

Simone Collins: because I thought they were more culturally isolated. It's

Malcolm Collins: what I'd expect if you have a cultural preference for high authority and following what the average of the community pressure.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Go ahead. I was going to say that we definitely have to study this more because we don't really know.

Simone Collins: More data is needed. I want to hone in on something that you said about sort of the factor that made people want to have a lot of more kids,

Which is that first kid is that they, they really like it. Like they have one and they get hooked. And I think Malcolm and I got hooked after two or three, like it wasn't, I think.

We think the hardest number of kids to have is one. It's just like, you're doing everything for the first time. It's too stressful. But I'm also curious from a policy or cultural design or lifestyle design standpoint, if you came across factors that you think correlated with that being a good versus bad experience, like basically being alone in a [00:28:00] box with your kid, sort of terrified and alone versus super enjoying what we think is like the hardest stage first time with everything.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah. Hmm. You know, I'm just, I'm reaching, it's not something that that I, I mean, I would certainly say I was gonna say some sounds, sounds obvious. Like, I would certainly say for me, the, the, the hardest transition was zero to one.

Hmm.

I think in terms of like, just the, the chaos of parenting, it was harder.

Like at three or four, or three toddlers was really tough. Oh. But yeah, like the lifestyle changes, like the psychological shock was biggest from zero to one. There she goes again. But I had a lot of I had a lot of kind of cultural capital coming into that because I came out of a large family.

So I kind of had this vision, like it's going to get better. Oh, you'd seen it before. Yeah. And I felt like that's probably the, the me, you know, like that would, that would have to be, but then, you know, then you kind of bump into this. I think it's one of the reasons why lower birth rates beget lower birth rates, like how you get into these traps that keep cycling [00:29:00] down because I think that the fewer kids there are around, the less you have like a, a belief that it will get better.

You haven't seen it before. So that we don't have any context to interpret how difficult that is.

Simone Collins: Yeah. At one point in the book, you do talk about the. The shortage of, of people growing up in America who even have had exposure to infants in their entire lives. Like maybe when they have a kid, that's their first time encountering a young human which definitely was.

It's pretty much the experience for me, for example.

Catherine Pakaluk: So do you think

Simone Collins: that's

Catherine Pakaluk: a big factor? I think that's a huge factor. I think, I think it's got to be a huge factor. I mean, I did some back of the envelope, you know, calculations, like how many, how many years of your childhood would you have been exposed, like even if you had one sibling, which is a pretty normal family these days, two kids.

Well, like most normal people are going to have their two kids and probably maximally like a five year span, which means that by the time, by the time your brother or sister is [00:30:00] born, you're like two by the time you're six, you're not going to remember a baby by the time you're 12, a baby never happened in your house, you know?

Right? So I think that's gotta be enormous. Like, and then you don't have cousins nearby and then that's it. That's, that's got to be really good. When you feel strange, like, well, think about like you're in the hospital and like you've got these unrelated human beings who are like, let me show you how to put up a baby on your boob.

Yes. Yeah. And change a diaper. And you think about like the dogs and the cats and that like you think what a weird species that we like need someone To show us how to feed our our offspring

Malcolm Collins: Which I hadn't thought to ask before but I guess it's actually really important for this new theory I have if you were going to Estimate what percentage of these high fertility families, you know five kids over when you were talking to them. Didn't plan on their children i. e. They were using a full jesus.

Take the wheel thing Not not tracking their cycles not anything like that Versus what percent do you think really intended on having every kid they had? [00:31:00]

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah well i'm pretty sure because I did ask like I asked about every kid in the interview It's it doesn't necessarily come out in the book I'm, pretty sure it was like one out of 55 was the jesus take the wheel case Yeah

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that was my way as well.

Incredibly rare. I was talking with a Catholic reporter about this and I was like, it's rare within Catholic communities. And he was like, what makes you think that? And then Simone had great evidence for that. She said, well, they track their cycle so well that they were the first to realize the vaccines were causing issues.

The only reason you would know your cycle that well.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yes, yes, exactly. I don't think they would mind if I yeah. Share this case, but well, I'll just say I know a young couple. I wouldn't say who they are, but they got married. They're Catholic. They got married. They knew because she was, they were tracking before they got married, cause they wanted to have kids.

They knew that they got married like on peak fertility. Nobody would know that. And so like they got off their honeymoon and knew that there was a good chance they were expecting because they got married on peak, peak, peak fertility tested at the earliest possible minute, you know, so, but [00:32:00] like under two weeks from their wedding, they knew they were expecting.

And you nailed it when you get people looking at them like you definitely must have like gotten pregnant before you got married But that's because people don't understand how granular that is and how much I could know about your cycle So that's really interesting. I only met one family I put them in the book because again like my job was to display the whole diversity of it The general story was that people did intend and knew exactly when they got pregnant but there was that one couple that in chapter seven and we're like we just didn't ever we didn't ever do anything to plan or it Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's really rare. And I, and I think that's what we should expect. Like, I think people are kind of, people are smart and they, they learn stuff and, well, I

Malcolm Collins: don't, I don't think it used to be that way. I, I think that this is a, that used to make up maybe 30 percent of, of some populations birth rate, maybe.

You know, 50 60 years ago.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, I think that's correct. And it's, but it's, it's one of the reasons why I don't know, some people sort of naive idea that we could just like ban [00:33:00] birth control would somehow like change the picture. I don't think it would change the picture.

Malcolm Collins: It might for like communities in poverty that are really uneducated like with apps being what they are now.

I think people just people find a way. Also,

Simone Collins: historically, you can see different birth rate trends and when economic prosperity goes up, suddenly birth rates go up to like, I've always kind of had a ways, even without the apps, even without, you know, you can pee on you. There have been so many ways for people to take care of their children.

I mean,

Catherine Pakaluk: probably, you know, probably like the teenagers and the kids that like people who aren't planning to have sex and then all of a sudden, you know, so they weren't tracking or something. But that's, again, that's that third category that's shrinking, this kind of accidental ones. But I think among the people who like.

Are coupled up or would like to be coupled up. I mean, I think people are they're either using birth control. They're tracking tracking is becoming incredibly common. And it's like, so easy to do it at this point. I do think that's going to be a huge piece of the future

Malcolm Collins: of what percent of the kids were in public school

Catherine Pakaluk: of the kids of the [00:34:00] women that I talked to.

Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'm curious. We're around public school in these communities. Or was this That's a great

Catherine Pakaluk: question. You've asked me a question for which I don't have a ready answer. I didn't total that up. But if I'm just thinking through the people I talked to it was certainly under 50%.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah.

That makes sense. Well, I mean, this is, I see it being terrified. We have our kids until middle school and public school or until they say they don't want to be there anymore. And our own community is like, you can't put that, like, what are you doing?

Catherine Pakaluk: Amazing.

Yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, we'll see. Well, I mean, I think that I mean, we're, this is a kind of a funny moment to talk about schooling because my own, I think like 10, 15 years from now, the, the menu of options that are going to be out there for schooling is going to be so diverse and so different from what we have now.

Malcolm Collins: Well, the Collins Institute is improving quickly. We're, we're adding a test and tutor to it, which should be ready by the summer. We're trying to

Simone Collins: like make possible at scale. And [00:35:00] very affordably aristocratic tutoring, which just seems like such a great way of learning, you know, just being able to explore what you like and talk to someone who can guide you through it

Catherine Pakaluk: and

Simone Collins: not be, you know, taken through this industrial system.

But yeah, I mean, I think a big factor that we look at certainly with pronatalism is just. School choice and educational freedom because there does seem to be this element of mainstream culture that just takes the focus away from that point that you point out of just kids are good. You know, kids are a blessing.

Kids are good. And that that is this really important meme that takes place with high fertility. And I'm, I'm curious to get your thoughts on like other ways that a country trying to improve its birth rates can do that. I mean, we've, when you were talking about your exposure to babies thing, for example, I was thinking about, I think it was in Australia, that one case where the birth control program, where teens had to take home baby dolls yeah, they were like, Oh wow, this is, I can handle this.

This is great. Like they, they got exposed even just fake baby dolls and it [00:36:00] encouraged more fertility, which is crazy. But then there's, there's kind of examples of like watching teen pregnancy reality TV. really successfully reducing rates of, of teen pregnancy. Cause they saw it as like low class or undesirable or disastrous.

And I'm curious if you saw anything among the families, I mean, it sounds like even within your family. Yeah. With your kids who are dating. There are some discussions on like, well, I mean, do the partners want to have kids? How do you promote a pronatalist kids are a blessing culture within your own family?

And how have you seen the families you've spoken with do it in a way that's not like, you know, creepy or backfiring.

Catherine Pakaluk: Right. Well, I, there's probably a lot of things to say if there's like the policy stuff, by the way, I wanted to say that I think, okay. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful that like the remote work stuff is going to keep going because I think it's crossed.

Yes. I think that's been, I mean, look, I, I work remote. I mean, although I, I have a job that wouldn't have been called remote work for a long time, but when I was in [00:37:00] college and I knew, like, I wanted to have kids and be, you know, be, be able to have kids. I remember looking at the menu of options. I was like, well, I'm, you know, Doing economics and math.

And, you know, there's a strong pull to do wall street or finance at that. And I'm looking at it like you have to be in your actual office, you know, like 40, 50, 60 hours a week, not going to work because I want to have a couple of kids. So I'm looking at it as a young person thinking, how come like academics aren't like all with a huge family?

Cause I'm thinking to myself is what blows my mind. It seems like these people have very flexible jobs, right? So, so why? Yeah, well, I think like academia is like tilted left and sort of anti natal as long as I can, I mean, certainly for 100 years, if not more.

Malcolm Collins: Have you run into anti natalists yet?

Catherine Pakaluk: At university or in general?

Within your

Malcolm Collins: job or within your promotion? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I

Catherine Pakaluk: get emails from them a lot. Oh, okay. I'm like, yeah, I mean, you know, like the nastier ones are the ones who send you these little scripts. Do you guys get them? Like little handwritten, scrawled notes and you're like, Oh, [00:38:00] yes. I'm looking at this script and like, I think you're 95 and you're in the Bay Area.

Was it on a

Simone Collins: used, like, bill envelope? Cause that's what we got. Like, you know, the ones with the windows of like, he just used, cause he's, he cares about the environment. There are too many people. So he's free using. Oh yes.

Catherine Pakaluk: They're like, you're like, you are

Malcolm Collins: just like filled with old bills and stuff like that.

And like writing books.

Catherine Pakaluk: No. Exactly. No, they, they do, they come out of the woodwork. They send you, you know, letters and you're, and you're like, you're so old and you're so out of touch, like, who is paying your bills? Like, you know, buddy, this is just outrageous. So I don't, I mean, I was gonna say, I don't have any colleagues or any, I haven't experienced anything super nasty personally.

Good. The antenatal, you work at Catholic

Malcolm Collins: University though, so. Oh.

Catherine Pakaluk: You would think, but I will say like politically there, it's all over the map.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Catherine Pakaluk: yeah. I'm so

Simone Collins: sorry. Catholic, but university, Malcolm, university.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, no, no, it's true. Yeah, I won't, I probably should, I should probably just leave it there.

Simone Collins: So, [00:39:00] and that makes sense though.

I mean, cause when we speak with academics especially when they're young. They're like, well, you know, no one would take me seriously if I got pregnant. And in all these things, I've been told not to have kids. And I mean, actually the same thing happened to us when we were in private equity. We had people be like, well, don't have kids until you've completely gone through the entire process and sold your company.

And we're like, oh, should we not tell them that we're pregnant right now? This is, and we just did it. And that's the thing is you have to just do it. You just have to do it. You just have to do it. Well, my husband's not on this.

Catherine Pakaluk: My husband's not in this conversation, but at some point the four of us will sit down together and like, you guys are not short on confidence.

And you know, like we're kind of similar, we're like, well, you know, my, you know, my way or the highway. So, but you know, it's true that definitely in the eighties and the nineties, like there was this very normie kind of thing, which was like in academia, you know, you had your, you, you. You had your, you finished your degree, you got tenure and then, you know, we were like 38, you would kind of start having, and it like didn't work for a lot of people and little by little people were like, Oh, you know, kind [00:40:00] of, so my advisor, one of my advisors was a female.

And you know, she really never said anything outright. But she at some point she dropped me the tiniest line and said, you know. You're, what did she, how did she put it? She said, you're, you're you're narrow, like you're, you're narrow, narrowly focused peers will regret their narrowness later.

And I,

and I thought like, that's not exactly a encouragement, but it's also not a discouragement. So it's kind of, you know, it's, it's pretty good for the ivory tower, you know, broadly antinatalist

Simone Collins: environment. That was her like, underground railroad of hinting.

Catherine Pakaluk: She didn't have kids and most of the women in the faculty didn't have children, but you know, you never really know like some people already know you

Malcolm Collins: were pregnant when she said that, though.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, that was, that was like, it was like three kids in and I'm sort of like, I'm sorry, I didn't get you this stuff. I'm slow. You know, she was like, she was a little, you know, she's the one voice of like, don't worry too much about

Simone Collins: it.

Catherine Pakaluk: Which was, yeah, I really am. I'm really great. I probably saved that message [00:41:00] someplace.

I thought it was like a miracle. But you know, I mean, especially when I was in my twenties, I didn't think of, of trying to find out why the childless women on the faculty didn't have kids. Like, was it because they had waited too long and couldn't, or is it because they didn't want to? I never asked her.

Simone Collins: Interesting.

Catherine Pakaluk: Seemed impertinent.

Simone Collins: I can't remember if this was mentioned in many of your interviews but did you find any trends with. male versus female task sharing within the household. I mean, there was a pretty good mix of like, there were some women who were full time mothers. There were some women who had sort of hybrid part time careers.

Someone fully in. Was there a pattern?

Catherine Pakaluk: What I heard a lot of was a lot of nice stories. I mean, again, you know, most mostly people volunteer to talk to an interview about their family size. You know, you're certainly not getting the people who are really upset about how things are going. So, I mean, I realize there's a bias there, but I got a lot of nice stories about, I mean, I guess I would say like, we would broadly think of it as like, we [00:42:00] figured out a way between us to kind of like share tasks in a way that is kind of division of labor ish.

And I would say that in general, it was kind of and I, there's like that one quote from The academic couple at the beginning of the book, and she says at the end of that chapter, she says something like we started out like kind of progressive and egalitarian. We're like, we're going to split everything 50, 50, whatever.

And she's like, but here we are with five kids. And it's kind of weird how traditional it's turned out to be. It's not intentional. It's just, it was like, we each leaned into our strengths and this is what we got. Whereas, you know, you had the couple where he was staying at home full time. So I guess I would say I heard a lot of stories about when you have a lot of kids there's a lot going on.

Like your household is certainly a complicated, almost as a small enterprise, right? It's something else that you're, you know, you have your work to manage and you have this other enterprise and if you're doing it well, you know, you've got like, you're developing your kids and you're, and so that, because it's an enterprise. We do the thing that we do in human life. Generally, we sort of like we make rational decisions like you're better at this. So you do it. So I [00:43:00] wouldn't say like, I know, I knew this guy a couple, he's an academic. I knew him through, through conferences. And they were homeschooling and their, their deal was like, he did all the cooking cause he was so good at it and he loved it.

And it was the deal because she was homeschooling. So she was like, well, by the time my day is over I've had it and he just did the, so I wouldn't say I got like this really long list of sort of like super traddy looking things, but rather sort of like, it's worked out well because, you know, he's good at some stuff.

I'm good at some stuff and efficiency means that's how you do it. You just, that actually says a lot

Simone Collins: though. Pretty radical because I think modern marriages are often like we are peers. We each do exactly the same thing. You know, maybe we make almost exactly the same amount of money with the male making a little bit more.

And with children, everyone has to do exactly the same thing interchangeably. And otherwise it's not, it's like early

Catherine Pakaluk: on. I mean, my husband and I didn't have any role like. We don't have any like principles about who does what and, and, [00:44:00] but I figured out really quickly, like if, if I, if I divided up like the nighttimes equally and I was like, you take this night and I take that night, the kid was going to not be happy

Simone Collins: and I

Catherine Pakaluk: was going to not sleep well.

So it was going to be like, not a good deal. So I'm just like, okay, I'm nicer in the middle of the night and I want my kids to have a nice life. So I'm going to see them in the middle of the night. But if we were to fast forward and like, look at their teenage years their early teen years, he does so much more with them in terms of like taking them to sports stuff.

Oh, that's interesting. So like stages of

Simone Collins: life too. Cause I would say like

Catherine Pakaluk: now, you know, now I'm working a lot more than I did when they were babies and he is. kind of, in a sense, I don't want to say over the hill. That's not right. He's, he's very productive. But he has done enough in his profession that he has time to, so he's like, you know, taking him to, he oversees the piano lessons, he oversees the music, he oversees the sports.

And I'm so glad, I'm so glad because those are. The things that I'm not really that good at. I'd be way inclined to be too much of a gentle parent, like the minute they're crying over a piano lesson. I'd be like, all right, that's it. We're done. We're [00:45:00] saving that money. My husband's like, no, this is so good for them.

We're doing this. We're going to push through it. So, you know, I'm glad I was the person that was getting up in the middle of the night. Cause I think the babies were. We're better for it. Better off for it. But we didn't, we didn't go into marriage with like this game plan. Like this is how I'm going to do it.

Right. You just sort of go hit the moment. You're like, yeah, I'll take him at two in the morning. Like you suck at this. It's like basically

Simone Collins: true. And you touched on something though, talking about that, you know, you, you do invest in some activities for your kids. And, and we also talked about sort of frugality at the beginning of this conversation briefly.

We, we, one of our big arguments is that. Parenting is completely overblown now, like people very, very unsustainably parent their kids and that's why they're like, well, I can't afford to have a kid, but they're basically raising a millionaire, like a retired playboy. And like, I don't know why you think that's normal.

Like it hasn't been for the vast majority of humanity. And I, I, but I, I feel very conflicted on this. Like, I don't want to both Malcolm and I are like, we want to give our kids everything we also want to be [00:46:00] reasonable. We don't want to spoil them. We don't want to coddle them. And we also don't want to clutter their lives with things that are like, you know, to your point, like we all get too much stuff.

So. Where have you found it to be, like, really useful to invest in things in your kids? And where have you just decided, like, we don't need to spend money on this?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, well, I definitely think skills and skills and things that are really challenging to learn. I think it's hard to self teach and a lot of those types of things, like, you know, I would say certain, certain academic things.

I mean, like, you know, you could do a lot in math and languages that. That your local schools aren't gonna be able to do. You can invest in tutors if you can't do it yourself. Those are things that are hard to just tell your kid, like, just pick it up. Right. Whereas whereas, you know, some of the skills my kids have are things that, because we didn't do, we didn't occupy, we didn't have tablets.

They didn't have devices. They didn't have video games. Like they went outside and did stuff. And those are things we, we really under parented in that sense. So my, my three oldest sons are all like kind of really accomplished fishermen. I don't know anything about fishing and neither does my husband.

Did they

Simone Collins: just go out and figure it out once?

Catherine Pakaluk: Yes, they 100 [00:47:00] percent did.

Simone Collins: How did you not get

Catherine Pakaluk: CVS

Simone Collins: cold on you? This is, this is the mystery.

Catherine Pakaluk: No, we lived in Florida. Well, this is the funny thing about it. We, we moved there. I thought my kids were going to eat and buy alligators. And but we lived, we had like, you know, there's, there's water everywhere.

And the kids are like, can we go to Bass Pro Shops? We want to learn to fish. Me being this like Northern sort of like. educated, you know, safety conscious mom. I'm like, they're going to die. Like they're going to get sharp stuff, you know? And of course, like, I know nothing at this point. I know nothing, you know?

And then I think it was the grandma that brought him to best, but like, it wasn't me. Right. So the grandma brought him over there. They go out there with their stuff. And then like the next thing, I don't see them for four hours. And so you're like, Hey, this is kind of good. Like that's good for them.

Right. But actually the end of the story is really kind of cool. Like they just, they became such good fishermen because of all the time they spent unsupervised, just kind of figuring it out. So it's kind of a mixture. There's a great story about them kind of in their mid teen years when they went out on a charter sea fishing boat.

And well, it was like a, like [00:48:00] a neighbor brought them on this thing and it was like a fancy thing. So they're out in this. deep sea boat off the gulf coast of Florida. And the captain says, Hey, they can't line up shoulder to shoulder on that, on that rail. Like they'll get their lines crossed. Yeah. The boat's moving, you know, the water's moving.

And so you can see that would be reasonable. And the neighbor guy that took him, he said, no, I think there'll be okay. And anyway, later the captain said, I've never seen three men stand shoulder to shoulder and not screw up. He said, but that's just, they stood shoulder to shoulder. Do we know how they learn, you know, so they're great fishermen.

So I think there's some mixture of like, there's a bunch of things you want to throw your kids at that allow for that kind of like just organic learning and lots and lots of time, but you know, music lessons there, most kids aren't going to. They're not going to persevere, you know. Our kids wouldn't

Malcolm Collins: do music lessons, no.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no. Who knows? I think for developing inhibitory control, that's amazing. Like, one of the things that I've read that really stuck with me [00:49:00] is that all humans now, in like sort of developed societies, have lost the ability to sit with discomfort. And that a lot of building resilience and maturity is about learning how to be uncomfortable and not to immediately freak out and think something needs to be fixed if you are not happy and serene.

And I think that things like music lessons, when it's just like, this is actually really frustrating and kind of boring and I'm not enjoying myself is like that is building that muscle for you. Yeah. So I like that, especially in the absence of a really strict religious environment where you're like fasting and get all these things out and like, you know, spending like three hours at mass every day, like things like that, because that also could do it, but it could do it.

Yeah. Most

Catherine Pakaluk: people don't.

Malcolm Collins: So, question. Do you, where do you see the most, because you've mentioned a number of guys cooking, where do you see the most gender nonconformity in large parent families in terms of the roles that are taken on?

Catherine Pakaluk: That's a good question. Probably a lot of like shuttling kids around.

Like if [00:50:00] you've got a drive to, yeah, I think, cause I think when I did that, see, I think, well, I think there's this idea of like the soccer moms, right? I mean, that was like, it was like not a dad thing. It was a mom thing. But I think that with the larger families, dad, but because of the number of trips, dads have to get involved with that.

I think. That's, that's it's softly at least a gender nonconforming thing. I think cooking is Cyber truck dads are the new stalker moms. Oh no, funny.

Simone Collins: That's it. It now makes sense. What dads? Cyber truck dads. Cyber truck? Yeah. Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: So I think that cooking, I think maybe tutoring or, or kind of helping, helping kids.

I mean, I did see, I don't think we've talked about this yet explicitly. I think there's some, there were a couple of you know, sort of the interaction with these kind of alternative forms of schooling. Because a lot of the dads are kind of getting involved with, with, with tutoring or helping the kids with, with schooling.

There were a couple of couples who kind of hit that place where they had kids in private schools and then realized like, we're either going to have another kid or we're going to keep schooling and we want another kid. [00:51:00] And then you hear like, well, that's when we turned into homeschoolers. And so, so that means dad's involved with a lot of stuff during the daytime.

Maybe. Come in working, working from home or kind of juggling in and out. So those are all kind of slightly, you know, they're not, he's not wearing a dress, but they're also like slightly gender nonconforming. Yeah. Bedtime, bath time. I mean, I was just going to say that's a big one. Yeah, there you go. I think.

Yeah, I think because there's this idea like mom's pretty pretty like tapped out by the end of the day, but when mom's

Malcolm Collins: pregnant again, she's got to go to sleep early. Yeah, I

Catherine Pakaluk: know. Leaning over a bathtub with that belly is a terrible thing.

Malcolm Collins: Not ideal. You don't trust me. Yeah, actually

Simone Collins: I do the baths because a bath with Malcolm is not to my standards.

Yeah, I see that's

Catherine Pakaluk: like middle of the night parenting is not to my standards of my husband. Yeah. He'd be like, he'd be like, I solved the problem. I just let the kid cry to sleep and you're [00:52:00] like, Oh yeah, you didn't solve the problem. You just turned the kid into like an anxious wreck for the rest of her life.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. No, I think that's the interesting thing too, about how division of labor plays out. It's, it's both what you're inclined to do and what you like to do, but also like where you can't tolerate your partner's standards. And then that's right. And you take it on. Exactly.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, exactly.

Simone Collins: Which makes sense.

Like to your point, like you're too gentle parenting around some things like piano lessons where the kids get frustrated. No, I would fold immediately.

Catherine Pakaluk: No, I would fold. I'm like, that's it. I can't. The kid is criminal. We're not.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, we get into trouble for barely beating our children. Barely. Barely. But I don't know.

It's interesting. I've talked to my wife. It's very interesting how we both intuitively have such similar beliefs. around, you know, punishment and the way I always get so happy when I see that she actually punishes a kid. And I know that everyone else is going to tell you to keep it like

Simone Collins: for context.

The last time he was berated by another parent in public, it was merely because he removed one of our children from an arcade because [00:53:00] that children, that child had stolen a toy from another girl who then started crying like horror, like what it's Breaking the cycle of trauma and like all these things and like Malcolm didn't hit the kid.

Malcolm didn't know. Malcolm just was like, we have to go home now. I only didn't hit the kid cause I was afraid of being yelled at

Malcolm Collins: too.

Catherine Pakaluk: Well, you're self regulating a little bit there.

Malcolm Collins: I don't want my kid to grow up to be a hippie. Yeah.

Catherine Pakaluk: That's so funny. Yeah. Well, but these are so

Simone Collins: go ahead. Sorry.

Catherine Pakaluk: Well, these are all things that like really grow out of experience. I mean, the first time you think like, maybe, maybe you have to smack your kid because they're reaching for something dangerous, you know, and you kind of realize like, it actually doesn't ruin anything.

It doesn't, your kid doesn't like love you any less. And, and then, you know, actually like over time, it, it creates a sort of a cycle of trust and exchange where the kid knows they're safe. And I mean, that's all good. And that's kind of like how it's meant to be. But these are definitely ways that [00:54:00] parents make or I don't know if it's, it's not that they.

mean to do it this way, but it ends up making parenting so much harder. Right? Like if your kids are well disciplined, well raised from when they're young, like they're not terrible in their teenage years.

Simone Collins: This is true. This is terrible. How old is your oldest? Our oldest is four. So we're still pretty young.

You're not

Catherine Pakaluk: at the payoff stage yet.

Simone Collins: But also like, I don't know if the payoff stage is ever going to come. Cause even though like Our kids are broadly honorable. They're also, like, we know genetically, like, from just the, the other family members that have gone through adolescence and adulthood, that the rebelliousness will not stop no matter what we do.

So we can more just be like, This is the price, like the new phrasing in our language is like, this is the price of this activity, like everything is a tax, you know, you can speed, you might get a speeding ticket, but it may be worth it, even if you have to pay that, like, whatever fine, because you need to get there, and we're like, yeah, maybe you're going to do this, this will be the price if you do it, cross the line, pay the [00:55:00] price but like, that's too funny.

That's all we can do now. We can just try to be like the real world. We can't develop some kind of like honor or morality. You have to

Malcolm Collins: learn, when you have kids, there's, there's this category of kids. I don't know if other kids are like our kids, but there's this category of kids where somebody is like, how, how much do you like punish your kids?

Like, how hard do you hit your kids? And I'm like, hard enough so that they don't laugh.

Catherine Pakaluk: Because it's not hard enough.

Malcolm Collins: It's just hilarious. And they're having fun. Yeah, they don't think it's a game. Like Jordan Peterson being like, I just sit that child down at the end of the table and I just wait him out.

And I'm like, wow. Your kids are really different from mine.

Catherine Pakaluk: Yeah, that's a lot of time too, by the way. I'm like, I got stuff to do, you know. Yeah, I do

not know.

Definitely in our in our parenting that's been different for different kids, right? Like each kid is pretty different. We've had some kids, you just look at them funny.

They're crying. Oh my gosh. All you need to do, right. It's just like, no, you know, and you, you know, wrinkle your, and they're like, why are you yelling at me? [00:56:00] You're like, nobody was yelling, but they just are so sensitive. That's how it feels to them. And then our daughter was like

Malcolm Collins: that when she was younger, but she grew out of that phase.

Yeah. Now she, she just,

Simone Collins: the important thing for her is that she makes eye contact with you while breaking the rule. Smiling. She just like loves to see your devastated face. Oh, the youngster. Okay. That's your baby. It's our number three.

Malcolm Collins: Intentionally break rules ever. Like Octavian almost never breaks rules.

Yeah. That's all. Okay. Punish the other kids if he sees them breaking a rule. But I think that's a very

Simone Collins: common first child thing.

Catherine Pakaluk: That is a very common first child thing. It doesn't mean that they don't have some other interesting things going on, but they're kind of like, they figured out the system.

They're like, those are the rules, right? But there's something else. Like I was like, the kids later, it'd be like, you didn't, you never knew what Joe was doing behind your back.

Simone Collins: That's no, I mean, like, that's the thing that at least Octavian has revealed to us as the eldest is that he likes the rules because then he believes that he has the right to impose them.

And when [00:57:00] we were trying to like adjudicate things between them and he was like, don't. Talk to the little ones like they were in his domain,

Catherine Pakaluk: he

Simone Collins: rules them and I think maybe that's a good

Catherine Pakaluk: and actually that's a great point. We haven't touched on, which is like the community of the children, right? Like how there's this cool thing that when you have a bunch of kids, like they actually.

Take on their own community. There's like the the parents and then there's the kids and they kind of like practice politics they practice like all kinds of like they make societies and they have their own rules and you know, Like pecking orders and it it's got to give them something that they this useful stuff that they take into society

Simone Collins: Absolutely.

Yeah, I'm gonna think it's like really brilliant people But like I love that I'm reading his his one of his books again, David Sedaris. Like I love his writing. Oh, yeah Great writer how much of his writing is about Growing up in a family of six kids and it's about the politics of them when they were young and the things that they got up to and you realize just how much kids really raise each other and I love that because Malcolm and I are very flawed [00:58:00] people and we don't necessarily believe that we have everything right for yourself.

I'm a very flawed person. My husband

Catherine Pakaluk: is perfect and beautiful. Malcolm is perfect and a hero and a saint.

Simone Collins: But I love that like, With every additional kid we have, that is one more moderating factor, where if we're wrong, maybe they'll be right. And they sort of make everything a little more reasonable, but

Catherine Pakaluk: Yes, and if you ask kids later, it's really interesting, because I don't think as parents we ever really get our feel for it.

They often have a completely different Story about what it was like, you know, to me, we imagine it's this and they have this completely different story and that's, I don't, I don't think we can ever bridge that, but it's, it's, it's a great point you're making that that our children can moderate kind of the experience of life for our other children.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Huge benefit. Oh my gosh. I just, I want to thank you again for writing Hannah's Children for doing that research.

Catherine Pakaluk: I do

Simone Collins: think that this is like, again, looking at how to move forward because we can't go back.

You have to look at these populations. What do educated [00:59:00] people who have a lot of kids, Yeah. What do they do? What do they say? What do they think? And to your point about, you know, young people being exposed to babies, I think to a great extent adults being exposed to high fertility families, even just through your book is, it has a very birth rate increasing property because it definitely did that to me.

And I'm not the only mother who's read your book and been like, I'm in for more. Because you're just like feeling like you get to know these families and you did great interviews with them. Thank you. It just really. Yeah. And I

Catherine Pakaluk: think, you

Simone Collins: know, most people when they have a lot of kids, it's like, it's just people act like you're crazy and then you're like, well, I must be crazy.

I can't do this. And this makes it seem doable. So everyone, if you haven't actually read this book yet, you've got to read this book. If you have a girlfriend who you want to maybe have considering like having more kids, like her wife, like maybe give it to her as a gift. Along with other really nice things as well, of course, maybe like, you know, some help around the house, cooking, driving somewhere.

Yeah. [01:00:00] Thank you so much for coming on this podcast. You're so welcome. And we'll see you at NatCon. We'll see you in Austin in like a month.

Catherine Pakaluk: This is the countdown. I know, it's great.

Simone Collins: Alright. Okay. One month from today. Good. Alright, well from today. Thank you very much.

Catherine Pakaluk: You're so welcome. That's fantastic.

Alright, I'm

Simone Collins: gonna end the recording here. That was fantastic. Really like keeping the house at 55. Okay. We're paying like 600 for electricity. So

Catherine Pakaluk: this is how it goes. But you know,

Simone Collins: I think a lot of it like comes down to your, you point out in Hannah's children. Yeah. Again, and again, how families just sort of choose to prioritize their kids too for these other things.

And I

Catherine Pakaluk: think there's something connect, there's a connection between thrift and having a lot of kids. I don't think I've got it like mathematically worked out, but it seems to be true.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

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