The Children of Men

At 25, medically the best age for childbearing, my friends and I talk more about the side effects of birth control than about childbirth itself. I am a young woman who grew up in twenty-first century America, who received every encouragement from my parents to chase my dreams, and who benefited from teachers and coaches who saw every potential in me; but reading Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children exposed just how little I had contemplated motherhood as an aspect of, much less an aspiration for, my future.

Amidst a fertility crisis first termed the “birth dearth” in the 1980s, Pakaluk’s study in Hannah’s Children takes the wonderfully counterintuitive approach of interviewing mothers who buck the trend by raising five or more children. In addition to considering the dire consequences of not addressing the fertility decline, Pakaluk provides some rare, positive publicity in favor of motherhood. In Pakaluk’s interviews, I found unexpected reasons to consider and look forward to motherhood, everything from personal growth to self-discovery to civic duty. However, I also found in her interviews a series of dialogues, lifeways, and lines of reasoning so different from mine and my generation’s that I expect the fertility crisis to worsen as Gen Z approaches childbearing age before it improves.

Of course, the lack of dialogue among young adults about childbearing is part and parcel of the secular shift in the US and other countries to having fewer children later in life. Researchers from NYU and the University of Wisconsin found that the US total fertility rate dropped from 2.12 births per woman in 2007 to 1.67 in 2022, and a recent MassMutual study found “nearly a quarter (23%) of Millennials and Gen Z without children do not plan to become parents.” However, if fertility decline poses an existential threat to American communities, the fabric of the nation, or Western civilization at large, a lack of dialogue around childbearing only further guarantees its decline. If fewer children lead to fewer conversations about having children, a vicious circle sets in of young women failing to plan for childbearing without peers having children, thus fewer women having children, and thus fewer thinking about and planning for children.

First, consider my generation’s commentary on motherhood, or lack thereof. Aside from the occasional comment by my mother, my day-to-day interactions and media consumption never challenge me to think about how or when I might have children. None of the heroines I grew up with, from Barbie to Katniss Everdeen, Jo March from Little Women to Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, navigated motherhood. Many iconic characters I idealized as a child (and still do) actively reject historically conventional female roles that society so closely associates with motherhood, perhaps detrimentally. I especially think of Barbie, who advanced the groundbreaking notion that a girl could grow up to be anything she wanted, an ideal that I certainly benefited from and still needs further advancement. However, it is interesting that Barbie was never portrayed as a parent. My generation of girls dreamed they could become anything, but we seldom dreamed of motherhood.

In comparison, Pakaluk heroizes motherhood on terms I have never encountered. From sleepless nights to postpartum depression and countless other challenges impossible to capture in one book, the mothers in Hannah’s Children demonstrate exceptional self-sacrifice but also recount incredible rewards. Many discuss raising children as a discovery of their life purpose; as one mother, Amanda, says, “They’re everything. They’re like the purpose.” Her elaboration raises the mother to the semi-divine, a shaper of human lives: “Nothing I ever do will be more purposeful, meaningful, and have more impact on a human than giving them a body and then nurturing them as a human.” In fact, before offering that insight, Amanda admits that she and her husband named their middle child “Atlas” because they felt like “the Greek god that had the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Perhaps humans truly tap into something supernatural when we become parents. Another interviewee echoes that spirit of challenge, describing motherhood as “long-term gratification, long-term self-fulfillment, through a lot of hard work.” No testimonials discounted the sacrifice demanded to raise a child, but all connected that work with immense reward.

Even mothers from conventionally fulfilling careers like medicine and law, including mothers who did not give up their professions, found motherhood trumped all. Pakaluk herself notes that she thought motherhood had been “undersold.” She explains, “When I had my first son early in a doctoral program, I was immersed in another world. And I thought that I would like having him. But I didn’t expect to like having him as much as I did.” As a young woman aspiring to a doctorate, hearing such attitudes begins to make motherhood sound like another goal I could enjoy pursuing someday rather than an obligation I must one day fulfill. 

Nevertheless, motherhood requires self-sacrifice, which is rarely celebrated in popular culture and commentary. Indeed, sacrifice of any kind is hardly celebrated. Consider my generation’s music taste. For example, pop artist Charli XCX’s album “Brat” became a defining cultural phenomenon of 2024 by reinventing a word often paired with “spoiled” to refer to a poorly behaved child. Dispelling its negative connotation, “brat” today affectionately describes someone “characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude” according to Collins Dictionary. The album is hardly alone in celebrating the self above all else: a 2024 study found that the use of pronouns “I” and “me” increased in many music genres in recent years. In other words, we have come to celebrate a devolved form of independence that gives way to indulgent, hedonistic tendencies—a cultural tilt hardly encouraging the sacrifice demanded by motherhood.  

That “brat” formerly described as a child speaks to a general infantilization of young adults, the album’s primary audience. Such infantilization produces logical conclusions like, “I could not have a child if I am still one myself.” A popular meme exemplifies this sentiment: a young woman justifies foregoing an obligation because “stress is bad for the baby.” She then clarifies that she is not, in fact, pregnant, but she is “the baby.” Although humorous, normalized infantilization is not the self-talk that produces a well-adjusted population capable of raising the next generation.

Pakaluk articulates the problem such self-focused narratives create for childbearing in a manner that made me feel both called out and called to action. For example, one mother interviewed laments her perception of my generation’s mindset: “They’re overly focused on themselves because of the way they’ve been taught, which is that they are of the most importance. And they’re oddly disconnected from others.” Monica, a former lawyer, points to “the philosophy of the small family” as a source of generational self-involvement and youthful self-regard. She compares the values implicitly taught in a small family to those learned by default in larger ones. More specifically, Monica discusses “those qualities of being able to serve others and to sacrifice for stuff, to work around problems, to get through things together, to understand an individual person’s different qualities and temperaments and work with it all—all those wonderful skills that are learned in a large family.” In comparison, a small family can afford more individual attention and accommodation than a large one, perhaps teaching each child to devote the same complete attention to him or herself. To reinforce the circle, such a philosophy does not encourage the selflessness required to raise a larger family. But again, I think cultural trends that are less directly connected to family lifeways also play a role, which Hannah’s Children alludes to but does not explicitly address.

What Pakaluk describes as the “autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle” gets closer to the heart of the issue. Despite a vague introduction to the idea, from my perspective, it resonates with ideals celebrated by some of the loudest voices in twenty-first century America. The onslaught of the convenience economy is another prominent source promoting an “autonomous, customized” lifestyle. Many live in a convenience paradise of same-day Amazon shipping, customized Starbucks orders, digital streaming, Uber Eats to our doorstep, and free-flowing consumer credit. Such services sell autonomy by eliminating travel time to acquire goods; they sell the convenience of making a purchase without cash in your bank account; and they certainly promote customization through personalized coffees and order settings to check “No Tomato” or “Extra Cheese.” Amidst such convenience, how could Gen Z conceive of anything so inconvenient as having a child?

Many interviewees’ perspectives starkly contrast to contemporary expectations of maximum choice, control, and convenience, privileges that motherhood hardly promotes. One mother reconciles this loss of agency by stressing how human experience fundamentally lacks autonomy. Angela, an academic like Pakaluk, does not so much minimize the lost autonomy from becoming a parent, but she seeks to put it in perspective, beginning with “a basic recognition of our own contingency.” She continues, “I did not put myself here. I am not taking myself out of here. I did not make the rules of engagement.” No individual decided to be born, which Angela offers as an example of all humans’ fundamental contingency on uncontrollable variables. Her perspective raises the point that if existence itself is happenstance rather than choice, must we insist on choosing so many aspects of our existence? Of course, the subtext of choosing or not choosing motherhood is hardly trivial, but because Pakaluk documents a consistent attitude of openness to change and happenstance throughout her sample of mothers, the contemporary cultural obsession with control and choice becomes more alarming. I worry that too many of my generation will lack the openness or daring to have children.

Hannah’s Children also considers the downstream effects of the fertility trends, looking beyond typical demographic concerns to consider what fewer children mean for the nation's character. Though not explicitly discussed, a logical implication is that fewer children will further infantilize America. Indeed, one interviewee observes that having children “makes you be a grown-up for the first time in your life.” Suddenly, “you have to grow up because someone who’s less grown up than you needs you to be a grownup,” prompting a wider transformation of the self. Her characterization reminded me of my mother, who said that becoming parents forced her and my father to confront all sorts of unexpected realizations about themselves, what they believed, and how they wished to impart those beliefs to their children. In other words, for many, the onset of parenthood completes the transition to adulthood by demanding personal growth. Of course, innumerable personal challenges prompt similar growth in the absence of children, including challenges like infertility itself, but the logic suggests that, at scale, a nation lacking children is also lacking adults. If we normalize the lack of children through beliefs like that the self is a “baby” demanding care, perhaps a fertility crisis will evolve into a crisis of adulthood by diminishing the need to “grow up.”

At the root of skepticism around childbearing is a normalized desire for control and indulgence of self-regard, though both also feed hesitancy around practicing adulthood. My generation likes the autonomy celebrated in the heroines of our youth and facilitated by the convenience economy, but this desire for ever-increasing autonomy is somewhat childish. Like teenagers on the brink of getting their driver’s license, we want the perks of independence that come with growing up without the restrictions of responsibility. For the teenager, that means paying for car insurance and gas, but for emerging adults, it might mean reconsidering parenthood despite the selfless sacrifice required. Unlike the cacophony of voices celebrating youth, independence, and maximum convenience, Pakaluk questions the virtues posed and benefits forgone by such lifestyles, offering a perspective critical for the next generation of prospective parents.     

Ainsley Weber is a Research Assistant at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and recent graduate of Yale University. The analysis and conclusions set forth are her own and do not reflect the views of the Board of Governors or the staff of the Federal Reserve System.