00:00:00.000This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne-Hellen Peterson.
00:00:10.660I'm Anna-Louise Sussman. I'm the author of
00:00:13.380Inconceivable, The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.
00:00:18.080Okay, we're going to start out actually with sort of a hard question,
00:00:21.700but it's one that I know my listeners are going to appreciate.
00:00:25.680We talk about this a lot in the newsletter and in the podcast.
00:00:28.500So the subtitle of your book includes the word family, like how having a family can feel inconceivable. So like a lot of people are going to push back and say you don't need kids to have a family. So why say the impossibility of family rather than the impossibility of having kids? Is that an editorial thing?
00:00:49.320Part of it probably has to do with just the rhythm of a title and how you want the title to sound. But I also think my agent does not have children. I don't think really necessarily ever wanted them.
00:01:04.460But when she read the essay that led to this book, when she and I worked on the proposal together, she would always tell me how much it resonated with her, even as someone who never really envisioned herself having children.
00:01:19.560Because it's really about the impossibility of finding time and making space for caring, loving relationships and how we live in a world where there's so much attention to profit, to optimization, to productivity, to survival in a lot of cases, that regardless of your definition of family,
00:01:45.420whether that includes a next generation, children, a chosen family. I think a lot of people really
00:01:52.120struggle to prioritize those important relationships. Perfect answer. Wonderful job.
00:01:59.720No, I think that that's really true. Whenever I talk to readers, listeners about the subject of
00:02:07.320my next book, which is really about friendship and about both the close and looser ties that
00:02:13.600are part of being in a community like it's so hard to prioritize those things as well so in some ways
00:02:22.700like it's inconceivable to the the inconceivability of both a family and a community both of those
00:02:29.500things i think are being pushed to the side by this push to optimize and produce at all times
00:02:35.040um we even survive you know i think a lot of people it's just keeping the lights on can really
00:02:40.640take a lot out of you and you don't necessarily have a lot of yourself to give at the end of the
00:02:45.060day. So this book grew out of a 2019 op-ed in the New York Times called, hold on, let me make sure
00:02:52.280I have the... The End of Babies. The End of Babies. The End of Babies. Did you feel like there was a
00:02:58.400whole book in there? I had been thinking about it as a book for a long time because I personally
00:03:06.960had been grappling with whether or how I could become a parent. You know, at the time I was in
00:03:15.400my early 30s, dating wasn't going so well. I was looking into freezing my eggs, which was its own
00:03:22.200huge expense that I was saving for. And I found myself wondering, you know, I have a really good
00:03:29.840college education. I'm lucky to not have student loans. I have all these things going for me.
00:06:05.940There's a demographer in Norway who I thought put it really well in an interview where he
00:06:11.120said, it's hard to know which uncertainty touches you, which uncertainty matters.
00:06:16.320You know, I read about or I listen to something about what's happening with food stamps and people getting kicked off their nutritional assistance. And when I hear about people who might not eat, who are skipping meals to feed their children, I mean, that anxiety is so contagious.
00:06:35.120You can empathize with them. You can feel what that's like. And it's because we live in a society, at least in the U.S., where there is such a threadbare safety net and people can fall through it so easily.
00:06:50.140it's easy to put yourself in their place and I feel like all of those things are close to us
00:06:56.920and they're also happening far away there's these macro changes I mean this is more in the last few
00:07:03.900years whereas demographic decline goes back farther than that but I think AI the fact that
00:07:10.040it's cutting 20 year olds off at the knees in terms of their professional trajectory is you
00:07:17.240You know, I don't see how you expect young people to have kids when they can't work and we are in a capitalist system where you have to work to eat.
00:07:25.980Yeah. I mean, this is like I think about how millennials were scarred at an incredibly formative age by the Great Recession.
00:07:34.020Just like these kids who were junior high, maybe younger when the pandemic hit and now they're graduating from college and there's no jobs.
00:07:43.880Like, how are they going to narrativize what happened to their trajectory and how they thought about, like, this is what life was supposed to be and it did not turn out that way?
00:07:54.900I think a lot of us listening in the U.S., people who are listening in the U.S., really understand the things that make having kids in the U.S. feel precarious.
00:08:03.400And part of this can be locational in terms of, like, access to maternal health care, all these sorts of things.
00:08:09.400But what is so, I think, compelling about your book is how global in scope it is. And it looks at these places like Scandinavia and specific like Denmark, like Norway, where there are a ton of services. The safety net is so robust and still the birth rate is declining. So can you talk a little bit about what demographers think is happening there?
00:08:32.680Absolutely. I think that is one of the areas where the idea of uncertainty is a really powerful explanatory variable. And this might sound familiar to American listeners as well.
00:08:46.560You know, certain things that young people expected or hoped for, big milestones like perhaps buying a home or getting promoted to mid-level position or something where you feel economically secure, those are no longer guaranteed or they take a lot longer than they used to.
00:09:06.840So there's a certain degree of neoliberal precarity that is part of the labor market, is part of the housing market.
00:09:13.260I mean, I know in Denmark in particular, they've had a lot of issues with asset managers buying up a lot of the housing. And so you have this idea of, you know, there's, again, this Norwegian demographer who's our age, he's in his early 30s. That's not my age.
00:09:34.880But, you know, more our generation than our parents' generation.
00:09:39.640And there's an idea from other demographers, Melissa Kearney, and I believe Philip Levine is her co-author.
00:09:46.720Sorry, she's an economist, and he may also be an economist.
00:09:49.240But they talk about this idea of shifting priorities.
00:09:52.260And I think you could look at it that way.
00:09:54.500And I think for some people, especially in Scandinavian countries, I think that for some people, that's absolutely it. You know, if you're growing up in Norway or Denmark and you're educated, you probably learn English. You can go, you know, work somewhere else. And, you know, you can have really great experiences that you are in a wealthy country. So depending on where you're situated in that society, you know, there are a lot of opportunities for you.
00:10:15.400So I don't I want to be clear. That's that's wonderful, you know, but it also leads to the possibility that you'll delay childbirth until it's quite late and you might need assistance.
00:10:28.160You know, Denmark has data about it's a roughly one in nine children are born with some sort of medical help.
00:10:34.240And so that suggests that people do want to have children, but they're waiting until it's they need some medical assistance to get there.
00:10:43.440But I think you can also look at it in a slightly more pessimistic way, which is that because of the uncertainty, because of the unknowability of the future, whereas, you know, in an earlier generation, you might get married and have kids and say, OK, we'll buy our home when we can and we'll work towards it.
00:11:01.340And we know that that's going to fall into place at some point.
00:11:04.740People feel like they have to have all these bases covered before they can even think of bringing a child into the world because everything feels so risky and everything feels so nerve wracking.
00:11:17.160And I think that's where the idea of relativity comes in.
00:11:21.880We're humans who are constantly looking around us and comparing our situation to others.
00:11:26.960So when I look at the situation in Norway, it's like, oh, I would have had seven children by now if I had those, you know, resources at my disposal.
00:11:34.600Not really, but, you know, I would love like another maybe, you know.
00:11:39.180And for them, they look backwards or upwards at their parents' generation and think, gosh, it's much tougher for me now.
00:11:46.920Everything costs more. Food costs more. Housing costs more.
00:11:50.300And when you think of things that way, it doesn't seem as straightforward as it perhaps did for our parents.
00:11:56.060Yeah. I also want to talk about a phrase that gets band-aided around a lot, which is the phrase replacement level, which always has struck me as like so sci-fi. Like, oh, we must like replace the drones or something. But when we look at replacement level, so basically that is like you look at the number of births necessary to keep us at our current population. Is that correct?
00:12:19.080The replacement level is it assumes that two people replace themselves with 2.1 people, give or take, to account for some child mortality. I mean, the whole, I know, like even that phrase right there is like the fact that, you know, a couple has to have a little more than a couple. I mean, yeah, the math, the math, people math is very disturbing, I think, in general. Let's keep those words apart.
00:12:45.320And I think like a lot of people feel, and this is why your book is so valuable, that just looking at those numbers always misses things. So what like if someone spouts a replacement level number at you, how do you how do you respond to that?
00:13:02.920Well, to that point, there was one thing that a man in Denmark said, and this was someone who wanted to have children. He was not yet partnered. The Scandinavian states are interesting because their welfare system depends on there being another generation that pays into it.
00:13:20.580They can't just pay out indefinitely. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund, but as far as I know, Denmark doesn't, and they don't have the same energy money. But he said, whenever I look on the front page of the paper and it says, we need more children because our pension fund is running out of money or something, he's like, cannot really think of a less compelling reason that just somehow doesn't tug at his heartstrings and convince him.
00:13:47.260But, you know, there's a scholar named Michelle Murphy who has this great line, and I may butcher it a little bit, but she says, you know, when she talks about population thinking, she said it's this idea that some people must die so others must live.
00:14:03.380You know, she has this metaphor of, I think it's the word entomologist, you know, a scientist who had a jar of flies, you know, and it's about, it's like, are we a jar and we're all flies and there's only enough sort of oxygen and nutrients for, you know, or like, is this really just about people and individuals and emotion?
00:14:26.280And I try to bring it back to the idea that having a child is about a relationship, you know, between a parent and a child and all the other people in the parent and child's life.
00:14:37.380You know, and that we need to think about what kind of society makes that possible, sustainable for all of us, and not just be thinking about it in numbers, but really about transforming our society so we recognize that we are all in relationship with one another.
00:14:55.820And the way we use resources and the way we structure work, you know, and the way we relate to each other is going to affect all of our quality of lives, our ability to live, you know, our ability to thrive. And so I think focusing on the numbers, you know, misses the point that each number, each quantity is a person.
00:15:14.820And I think, yeah, none of us, none of us would like to be treated as a, you know, 1.05 person that, you know, brought us partway to the replacement rate.
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00:19:46.620So we're going to start going into reader questions now.
00:19:49.360We have some excellent, excellent ones. People have so many thoughts on this. The first one is a little provocative, but I wanted to start it because I think that it starts us on a road towards thinking about like who has been asking these questions, who is thinking about this. So let's hear from Rebecca.
00:20:08.100Why are so many men claiming to have the definitive answer on this?
00:20:14.640Why won't more economists accept the evidence-supported narratives that center women's education, women's agency, and women's desires to live good lives?
00:20:24.680So what do you think Rebecca's gesturing towards here?
00:20:27.500Because I understand what she's saying in terms of, like, essentially women have different options.
00:20:33.000And so some of them are choosing those other options and then becoming childbears.
00:20:38.100Absolutely. I mean, I think one answer to Rebecca's question is simple. There are a lot of men out there who really like to hear themselves talk. And they want to talk about this, among other things. But I think also to be fair to some of the men talking about this, you know, the ones who study this, and let's be clear, there are men and women and people of all genders who are economists, who are demographers.
00:21:02.640But, you know, there are standard sort of explanations and accepted theories for why fertility has been falling, like second demographic transition theory. You know, they do attribute it to women's education, the increased availability of effective contraception. You know, I mentioned the shifting priorities theory.
00:21:22.060And, you know, more recently, Claudia Golden, who is a Nobel Prize winning economist at Harvard.
00:21:29.780And she's, you know, she's written a lot about the labor market, the incompatibility of work and family and how women navigate that.
00:21:35.760She's been shifting her sort of research and theorizing to looking at time use and how male partners don't really do enough and how women's calculations around having children are also very much about what they can expect from their partner.
00:21:56.220And if that math is not mathing, then they're opting out. And as Rebecca said, you know, they are choosing other fulfilling life options.
00:22:05.760Yes. Yeah. And that point is so interesting to me. And I think a lot of it has to do with people who are partnered with their partner for a long time before this question of having kids comes up, which was just not a thing before.
00:22:19.560Right. Either because like religious structures dictated that, like, if you want to have sex, like you got to get married or just like getting married much younger.
00:22:30.400So having a much shorter amount of courtship like now, you know, you're a partner.
00:22:35.640Most people know their partner. And so before they get pregnant, they have a sense of how the labor is going to be divided.
00:22:43.400And yet you also hear a lot of women say kids changed everything.0.97
00:22:47.280Uh-huh. Like my feminism went out the door as soon as I had a kid, at least feminist division of labor or my feminist husband. I remember having a very blunt conversation with my partner about like, essentially, I just don't think both of us can have the ambitious careers that we have.1.00
00:23:05.280I mean, we had very hungry, we have very hungry jobs, which is one of my favorite greedy jobs that like that took so much time and demanded a lot of travel, a lot of flexibility.
00:23:19.340And if there was a kid, one of us would have to step back from that ambition.
00:23:24.240And I was like, I don't want to do it.
00:23:28.220so you know impasse and what you and i think in a lot of couples what happens is that the woman
00:23:36.680necessarily because even if they don't want to becomes that person either because of structural
00:23:41.820wage gaps like they're just making less they can quote unquote afford to become the person who
00:23:47.140becomes less ambitious or because they're like just the physical nature i it's so many couples
00:23:54.020that are like, if the man could gestate the baby and breastfeed, like that would change their
00:23:59.100calculus of having kids. And I just feel like we're part of the reason that this conversation
00:24:04.800is difficult or that the birth rate, like getting more people to have kids is difficult is because
00:24:10.800we are bound by the physical nature of when we can have kids and who has to have the kid.
00:24:18.320Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there are I think this gets into really interesting questions of
00:24:23.920do we want technological fixes? Formula is a technological fix. I don't think people want to
00:24:32.780liken it to artificial womb technology, for example. But I was just listening to a podcast
00:24:39.360of some scholars talking about kind of feminist science fiction and speculative fiction. And
00:24:45.100one of them said, women's bodies are a technology. Yeah. They're the best available technology we1.00
00:24:51.780have for creating new humans um so yeah that's uh that's an asymmetry that will always be there
00:24:59.500and i think one question we should ask ourselves is how do we want to accommodate that if that is
00:25:06.960part of what it takes to perpetuate our species do we want to pretend it doesn't exist you know
00:25:14.600To accommodate it, not penalize it, accept it, support it, honor it in all these different ways and not in like conservative, like, oh, let's put motherhood on a throne thing, but genuinely support it and make sure that women don't die in birth and, you know, all those other things.
00:25:36.740So this next question comes from Kristen, and it basically sets up the thesis of your book, but I wanted a chance for us to go even deeper on it. So here we go.
00:25:44.600Why do discussions around the drop in fertility rates seemingly miss the obvious?
00:25:49.960That more people than ever simply do not want to have children, even if they have the means and support to do so.
00:25:56.360Would the removal of economic or structural barriers actually lead to more people having children broadly,
00:26:02.340or just make it easier for parents to have more children?
00:26:05.840Is it a worthy endeavor to address the cultural changes that have changed so many young adults' desires for a happy life to be without children?
00:26:13.500Is there a larger existential issue with hyper-individualism eclipsing the deep need for connection through family and community, which is often replaced with friendships or chosen families that are homogenous in age and subculture?
00:26:33.820I mean, first and foremost, and I say this in the book, and I will say it anytime anyone asks me this, I never want to argue that someone should want a child.
00:26:43.000Yeah. Let alone should have a child. But I do think there is a very large population of people that that wants children or think they might want children. You hear a lot about maternal ambivalence. I'm sure there's paternal ambivalence, too. Yeah. Much about it. Right.
00:27:00.080You know, there's a whole Reddit sub community of, you know, called fence sitters. It's very fascinating reading if you ever want to dive into it. But listen, the fact that people are more and more accepting of the choice to not have kids is obviously a sign of social progress. And we really needed that, especially for women.
00:27:18.300And the fact that women have the means to, you know, not have children if they don't want to is also, you know, to the extent that that's not being totally rolled back in a lot of places is also important.
00:27:32.780You know, like the last time I looked, surveys conducted in the U.S. showed that Americans want more children than they have.
00:27:40.660So depending on what survey, it's about 2.1 to 2.7 children on average.
00:27:46.120and right now women will have about 1.6 births per lifetime so that's half or even more than a
00:27:54.500full child that's kind of missing from families of the people who want them so i think you can
00:28:00.900break this down into you know people who say i have absolutely zero interest in children in the
00:28:07.500parenting relationship uh in in having that responsibility or i have other priorities or i
00:28:13.540have other caregiving obligations that are important to me that I need to meet. And then
00:28:17.980there's obviously people who love children, nothing's going to get in their way. And then
00:28:22.720you have what I would imagine is a fairly large group in the middle. And I think for some share
00:28:28.320of that group in the middle, removing barriers, if you were to remove some of the barriers,
00:28:33.840the economic barriers in particular, that could help them envision even the possibility of,
00:28:41.360you know, what an enjoyable family life would look like instead of a really stressful,
00:28:47.900scarce kind of uphill climb of having a family. And I do believe that demographers are very
00:28:54.700cognizant of what they call fertility intentions. There are surveys that ask how many children women
00:29:02.660want to have. And what's interesting is you do, you know, to your point, to the listener's point,
00:29:07.460You do see a rise in people who are saying that they don't want children, and one place where that's risen really dramatically, especially among women, is in China.
00:29:17.940So there's a recent paper from a Brown University professor that looked at what's called zero fertility desire. And the scholar found that the share of young adults who are 18 to 24 reporting no desire for children tripled throughout the 2010s from 5% in 2012 to 32%, it's more than tripled, to 32% right after COVID.
00:29:44.760And that, again, stratifies along gender lines where young women were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to say they wanted no children at all.
00:29:56.420In 2023, it was almost one out of two children.
00:29:59.360It was 47% of young women in that age group were saying they had no desire for children.
00:30:05.060So to me, that could tell you something about their genuine desire for children.
00:30:09.920And I don't want to second guess or, you know, bad faith, but it could also tell you a lot about because the difference is so stark in that generation between women and women, it could also tell you a lot about what it's like to be a woman.
00:30:23.660Because it's not across the entire generation.1.00
00:30:27.260It's very much concentrated among women.
00:30:29.660See, that's how I think about it, too. Like, even if I could rewind in time and have like total stability and like, you know, abundant health care or health care, but also child care and like no student loans, like all the things that like theoretically like remove the precarity.
00:30:48.560still I would be trying to function in American society as it is now like those stability things
00:30:56.020would could be in place but like the understanding of what a successful life looks like like
00:31:01.560the understanding of what you know intensive parenting looks like all of these things would
00:31:06.640still be there so even if you put the structural stuff there it's still not going to make me want
00:31:10.840to be a parent if that makes sense like yeah so I think that that's sometimes like when we're
00:31:16.960thinking about ambivalence. People aren't just choosing, I don't want to have the encumbrance
00:31:21.400of children. It's more like, I don't want to, this bargain is a bad one for me.
00:31:26.620I spoke to a Korean woman who had been through their cram school system.
00:31:32.840For people who don't know, children after they get out of school are taken to have these extra
00:31:37.640lessons that can go until 10 at night. They're almost not optional because everyone goes to them.
00:31:45.060It's a society-wide thing. It can cost $2,000, $2,400, $2,500 a month on top of whatever you're paying for school and your other expenses. And she found it so miserable. And it's almost entirely the woman's job to research, the mom's job to research them and to shuttle the kids around.
00:32:06.900Yep. And she said the only way basically that she could envision avoiding sending her own kids to this system that she found such a pressure cooker and so unpleasant was to simply not have a child. Yeah.0.57
00:32:21.220So I think that point you made about, and I have a whole chapter in the book about the nature of education and how it's changed. We've created a system where there's no, you know, relaxed, joyful way to become a parent these days in the U.S.
00:32:41.880And it's, you know, this one policy scholar who I am friendly with mentioned, he said, yeah, if you don't do all that stuff, it's like that you're unilaterally disarming. And no one wants to do that when it comes to their child's future.
00:32:58.960So, yep, yep. Yeah, that's it. Like I said, like you're still like bringing a child into the society. And the point of the cram school also reminds me that like different people experience the precarity differently, like there are different vectors of it.
00:33:15.400And so when I talk to someone who is incredibly, incredibly worried about what's going to happen climate-wise for this next generation, and they really do not want to bring another generation of children into the world to experience that, like, that's their future that they are terrified of.
00:33:32.960And then other people are really terrified of, like, things like this next question.
00:33:38.880This person wants to be anonymous, so Melody's going to read the question.
00:33:42.080My husband and I struggle with whether or not we want kids.
00:33:45.400As an engineer from Venezuela, he came to the U.S. to make a better life for himself and his future family.
00:33:51.040At the same time, having lived through the Venezuelan crisis of the last 20 years,
00:33:55.160he's very aware of the harm that could happen to young children due to geopolitical factors.
00:34:00.360As a woman in the workforce, I'm all too aware of the penalty mothers take financially and career-wise,
00:34:05.360and that's before the costs of child care, lack of health care and abortion access, etc.
00:34:10.480Especially now with the administration's ICE increase and threatening deportations to people in our community, we can't even fathom starting a family now. We have the most amazing, supportive family and community around us who would be our village. But in the wider geopolitical sphere, how are others grappling with these existential forces?
00:34:29.060so you talk about this a lot yeah this is heartbreaking I know this is heartbreaking
00:34:35.520because this listener gestures at the wonderful people in her life you know who presumably would
00:34:42.900be so excited to love this listener and their husband's child and to welcome that child into
00:34:51.320the world but I mean one thing I really want people I interviewed over a hundred individuals
00:34:58.340couples, experts for this book. And I really want people to know that they're not alone
00:35:03.200in grappling with these things. You're trying to make this really intimate, personal decision,
00:35:09.620lifelong decision. And there's these existential geopolitical factors that are threatening it and
00:35:16.120weighing on it is so unfair. I think people, you know, I talked to a climate psychologist who
00:35:22.180specializes in climate grief and she said that's that it just makes it so unfair it's not something
00:35:29.140you can control at all and yet it's affecting your um you know your ability to love a child
00:35:37.860or not and have a child or not um so you know but this this sense of uncertainty about the future is
00:35:45.060a really important factor in why people don't have children and i think you can just extrapolate to
00:35:51.620you know, we just talked about the crazy education system. Like, you know, I'm arguing that we've
00:35:57.180created a very inhumane world. And it's not a surprise that humans are hesitant to make more
00:36:04.020humans and put them in a world that's like not compatible with humanity. But, you know, I do
00:36:11.480hear different responses to this question of how to grapple with the uncertainty. I mean, there's
00:36:17.600been studies that have documented, you know, disproportionate rises in people seeking
00:36:21.140sterilizations and permanent contraception in abortion ban states. You know, so some people
00:36:27.980will look around and say, there's just too much risk out there for me. I'm not going to do it.
00:36:32.080In fact, I'm going to make sure I can't do this. And then I've heard of other people, you know,
00:36:37.240who take a different approach. You know, I've spoken to people who after, especially after
00:36:41.640Trump's second election, you know, were feeling really dismayed, but it was also almost galvanizing
00:36:47.160And you hear that idea of, you know, I'm not going to let those people take this joy from me or this love, you know, this family, this child I've always wanted.
00:36:58.260You know, I mentioned earlier, one of my big fears, apart from climate stuff, is AI and how it's going to affect my ability to earn.
00:37:06.740And, you know, there's a world in which I have a second child.
00:37:13.220Right now we live in a world where there is a lot of AI.
00:37:16.480So as soon as I heard about it and read about it, I thought, you know, I may not be able to earn money in a few years. And so it really doesn't feel responsible to have a child under those circumstances. And that's painful because it's something that's so out of my control. It's so huge. And yet it's creating this new labor market that, you know, I really don't know if I have a place in it.
00:37:41.560So all that is to say to the listener, you're not alone in feeling this way. And I'm sorry, because I think it's really painful and unfair.
00:37:50.640You know, I think that like the other counter argument that I've seen is like, oh, well, in the times of deepest despair, having a child is like an act of hope. Right.
00:38:00.060And this is, I think, often narrativized in like things about war, like any story about war, film about war is like, and then we had a baby is like the next like generation of hope to like say like there is a better world possible.
00:38:14.480and I understand that and like how so how is that conceived of in the data in like the research that's
00:38:24.300out there in terms of people still having children even especially in situations where
00:38:31.680their lives are so much more precarious than a middle-class college educated earner in the
00:38:38.120United States? When I was planning my pregnancy, and I think maybe while I was pregnant, I read
00:38:46.280a book called Invisible Child, which is about a young woman who grows up in New York City with,
00:38:53.700I believe she has nine or 10 siblings, and her parents are married, but they are all unsheltered.
00:39:01.960they live in different shelters in New York City's shelter system. And it was very, you know,
00:39:09.620it's obviously not, that's an exceptionally large family size, regardless of socioeconomic status,
00:39:16.020not that many people have families that large. But the mom said, I want my children to have each
00:39:22.500other. I want them to keep each other safe and protect each other. And there was no,
00:39:29.020I also you know I also think it's interesting because there's so much marriage propaganda
00:39:33.440about how if you get married it will sort of solve all your financial problems and
00:39:39.200children will go to great colleges and you know I think these these were married parents they
00:39:45.500weren't the sort of stigmatized unwed you know non-maritable these were marital
00:39:51.340births in the sort of social science parlance. But it was so different, you know, that family's
00:40:00.460risk tolerance and the level of instability they were capable of living with, even as they grew
00:40:09.020their family, totally different from mine. You know, whether, you know, I don't know the family,
00:40:18.360I haven't interviewed them. So, you know, I don't know to what extent they think of this as an act of hope or anything like that. But I do think people just respond. It's so individualized. I mean, there's someone I talked to in the book who, you know, her parents divorced when she was younger and she had she had experienced downward social mobility at a young age.
00:40:40.900You know, my father passed away when I was young, and I experienced something similar where, you know, all of a sudden your household income drops precipitously, and so things are different. And that can also leave some sort of psychological scar or adjust your expectations for what sort of stability you want to have in place before you have a child.
00:41:01.980Yep, absolutely. Like, I don't think that we talk enough about class reproduction when we talk about why people may or may not be having kids and how we are told, like, you have kids so that they can have a better life than you do.
00:41:16.120And that that seems to not be part of the, like, where we're headed. But then also, like, if we historicize this a little bit, even just the idea of, like, every child is incredibly precious, like the, you know, the invention of the precious child.
00:41:36.420Yes. It's like such a relatively new phenomenon to think of children this way.
00:41:42.340And that for, you know, for many centuries, millennia, like you just you had as many children as you could so that you could survive economically, like that they were in part instruments for economic survival.
00:41:59.760Like, we just think a lot more about the fate of our children in a way that I think, like, our ancestors might not have in the ways that we do.
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00:44:15.220So, Melody, I have been spending some time on the article website, and I have an object that I would like.
00:51:02.660She may have needed some medical attention,
00:51:03.960but they basically left the hospital with like, I don't know, $290,000, $100,000 in debt,
00:51:12.080something like that. And I just thought, what a way to start life, you know, under that much
00:51:17.520stress. It was really, really awful. And I know some countries are, you know, that the idea,
00:51:24.220and even some, I believe, conservatives have said like, the least we could do is make child
00:51:28.440birth free like don't make someone start out in debt i'm doing this thing that like supposedly
00:51:37.380our society is begging everyone to do yeah do you feel like you know i see things like the child
00:51:43.440credit like tax credit and that sort of thing and they just seem so like it's just like scratching
00:51:51.160the surface like it almost feels like a like a hollow gesture instead of this like larger
00:51:56.560structural reform but even even with the larger structure stuff like if we make child care free
00:52:01.300it's still like there's still all these other things i it makes me feel somewhat hopeless do
00:52:06.940you like do you did you finish the book feeling hope like you know you know about finishing books
00:52:13.500right yes you're like get it away from me as soon as possible but also you're supposed to say no
00:52:20.820there's hope you know i have a solution um yeah i mean i think the argument of the book is
00:52:28.360exactly as you said it's not just one thing i mean certainly look i'm not going to push a
00:52:33.780couple thousand dollars out of bed like if you have you know a tax credit that you want to give
00:52:38.620me or expand like sure i'm happy for it but like is it is it you know anything more than a rounding
00:52:46.140error for most middle class people, given what child care costs. I mean, you know, a few thousand
00:52:54.100dollars is like maybe a month of child care, depending where you live. So, you know, and
00:52:59.660depending when they start school, that's one out of 36, 40, 50 months that they'll need child care.
00:53:08.940So it doesn't hurt, but it really doesn't, I think, move the needle at all.
00:53:12.840Can you talk about the company in South Korea that essentially gave massive bonuses to any of their employees who had children and how that shifted, like, a lot of things?
00:53:32.980So what it worked out to, I believe it was a million Korean won. I have to go back and look at the exact numbers. But it worked out to, I think, around three years of someone's salary. Now, that is a decent amount of money. I think right now the American household income is somewhere around 90,000 median household income.
00:53:55.120So we're not talking $2,000 or $3,000.
00:53:59.140We're talking $270,000, you know, would be the U.S. equivalent.
00:54:06.400They also, the company also said that for people who had three children, they would give them housing.
00:54:13.240So I think if we're talking about addressing uncertainty and this question of, you know, I'm having a child, which is a lifelong commitment.
00:54:21.920um so i need to know not just that like my next month of child care is paid for but i need to be
00:54:28.420able to project farther out in the future you need to have something that is sort of temporally
00:54:35.260aligned with that and three years of salary you know you can put that aside you can save you know
00:54:41.320i mean that you can use some of it for child care i mean that that's that's like actual money to play
00:54:45.720with and plan with and project forward a little bit more. Having guaranteed housing obviously
00:54:52.340takes away one of the biggest worries. They happen to be a construction company, so I guess
00:54:58.360houses to dole out. But, you know, I think that is something that could be very enticing for
00:55:06.840people. And, you know, obviously there's a question of, is someone going to have a third
00:55:13.760kid just to get a free apartment i mean i don't know maybe maybe they've had people have had third
00:55:20.480children for far fewer reasons but i think that that gives you a sense of the scale of what
00:55:26.840actually helps people take the plunge when they're still where there remains it's like what
00:55:33.720what uncertainty can you x out you know and then what still remains and how do you how does each
00:55:40.140person. As we said, this is such an individual choice. There's family history, there's psychology,
00:55:45.060there's individual risk tolerance, your sort of constitution, you know, all those things play
00:55:50.500into it, your relationship, the relationship stability, all those things. But I think there
00:55:55.840are clearly places where policy can help. Well, and we haven't even talked about like
00:56:02.340the other thing that is in place that allows people to feel very comfortable having kids
00:56:07.480or like there's purpose, which is if there's religious belief in some capacity, then that's
00:56:14.460not a problem. Like it's a grounding that you just have as part of your life. Like this is what I do.
00:56:19.500You feel this call. Like it feels very normal. Can you talk a little bit about that? And, you know,
00:56:24.980that's where we see the birth rate actually staying steady is within some religious communities.
00:56:30.860But then also we have an increase in the number of quote unquote nuns. So people with not
00:56:37.260nuns n-u-n n-o-n-e like no religious belief um and how maybe that's part of the reason
00:56:45.220like if you don't see this as your religious calling or as like your spiritual calling0.54
00:56:49.580it's easier to set down but if you do see it as like part of being a good woman under god or under
00:56:55.440whatever your belief system is like then it's easier to to do it no regardless of the other
00:57:01.120instabilities. Absolutely. I think religion, you know, there's a great book by Catherine
00:57:08.840Pakula called Hannah's Children. She looked at the very, very small share of women who have five
00:57:17.760or more children in the U.S. and set out to interview a bunch of them. She interviewed0.62
00:57:22.840upwards of 50 moms, if I'm not mistaken, and pretty much all of them had a faith belief,
00:57:30.160And most of them were quite devout. And they spoke about more than one way. You know, there's the obvious thing that you talked about, that this is a calling. This is what women are supposed to do. But even taking the gender out of it, you know, that we are part of a cosmic chain that goes back to, you know, some sort of origin story about humankind. And there is good in that continuity.
00:57:56.260um but also on a very practical level you know other people around it's normalized other people
00:58:03.560around you have big families there's so much support and so you know so that means there's
00:58:07.960an infrastructure for all of you and your lifestyles are very compatible with it um you know
00:58:15.720So I read that book wondering what lessons were transferable for not religious people.
00:58:25.120I mean, for me, when I look at like the Mormon church, LDS, like they have an incredible, like near socialistic support system.
00:58:35.800You know, like same, same. Yeah, exactly.
00:58:39.420And like, so that's the lesson. I'm like, oh, you want more, you want people to have as many kids as like many Mormon women do, then you need to have a support system in place for your kids that really treat your kids as part of a larger system of support.0.96
00:58:54.920I mean, I think it's telling what the author's conclusion is. So I got to the end. I'm like, what's she going to say? What's she going to say? How do we, you know? And her answer is to basically expand the role of religion in public life, you know, and make people more religious.0.98
00:59:12.620which is also what you know someone like a Brad Wilcox who writes about trying to
00:59:18.240marriage you know he wants people to be more like religious people you know he his book is
00:59:24.680organized around let's look at the qualities of people who are more likely to wind up married
00:59:29.540they're college educated they're Asian American they are and they're religious and there may be
00:59:37.300another couple factors. But it's like, you can't make people more Asian. You know, there's
00:59:43.960structural issues with going to college that we know about. And skepticism of college, also among
00:59:50.720college age, you know, people who might, that demographic. And as you said, the trend is not
00:59:57.520towards becoming more religious, although now there's some debate about a religious revival
01:00:02.380and Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.
01:00:05.620But anyway, I'm not sure that's a sustainable solution
01:00:09.800because I just don't think you can policy lever that into place.
01:00:16.540The religious right is tried with Christian nationalism,
01:00:19.700but it's just not like it's not working the way that they think it's working.
01:00:24.340But I think that what we see, at least in the U.S.,
01:00:27.380We see a lot of policy that is directed towards trying to lever that into place.
01:00:34.520And it just makes life miserable for people who aren't in those scenarios already, right?
01:00:41.500Like I see this in my home state of Idaho.
01:00:43.020Like I always see this legislation that like applies to the percentage of the population that is living in like a place where it's very cheap to to live and to have like, you know, one one working parent and have one parent stay home.
01:01:00.900And like so the policy is made for that percentage. And then everyone else is just like and also like and belong to a religion that doesn't believe in abortion or doesn't believe in like that women should be outside the home and that sort of thing.
01:01:14.460And this is another thing because, like, part of the difficulty in having kids is not just, like, becoming pregnant if you want to become pregnant, but even there are so many barriers to adopting kids and to becoming a parent in different ways.
01:01:31.460So we want to talk about that as well.
01:01:37.800I know that I don't want to have a biological child, but I'm interested in trying to foster or adopt.
01:01:45.120However, trying to figure out how to get started with either of these paths, especially as someone who doesn't have a lot of extra money for adoption fees and who feels very conflicted about the family separation that our foster system engages in, has been challenging.
01:02:00.480What advice do you have for someone who is trying to get started and exploring ways to have a family beyond having a biological child?
01:02:08.620So you don't have to give like, you know, you're not a social worker, so you don't have to give like super practical advice here.
01:02:14.980But like, I think maybe talking a little bit about these barriers and what like and how you've seen people negotiate them.
01:02:22.200I mean, I am is absolutely right that I think when people are, for example, struggling to get pregnant spontaneously and someone says just adopt.
01:02:31.340You know, it's a very flippant way of talking about that.
01:02:38.300And also, yeah, it doesn't account for the really high costs.
01:02:41.680The costs are comparable to doing many rounds of IVF from what I've seen.
01:02:47.220They can be six figures, like the low six figures.
01:02:50.560I think also Emma is right in recognizing there are very deep problems with family separation in the foster care system.
01:03:00.220I have seen a little bit of this up close recently in a friend's life.
01:03:06.160I think it's worth reminding ourselves that in every system there are some people who are trying to do their best.
01:03:14.680You know, there are others phoning it in or who are really bad at their jobs or who, you know, may harm people on purpose or accidentally.
01:03:22.540But I do think it's worth also kind of trying to go case by case, you know, and reminding yourself that, yes, it's a problematic system, but you may be able to intervene.
01:03:36.520And, you know, another way to do that and perhaps have the best chance of a positive outcome is by always centering the best interests of the child.
01:03:44.960Um, you know, and so if you, if there is someone who is not in a situation to parent their own child, could you be someone who provides love and care? And then if that parent gets to a better place, could you be, would you be comfortable helping them reunite?
01:04:01.860um yeah you know i know of a family who were planning an adoption but it included you know
01:04:08.140ongoing visits and ongoing relationship with the birth mother regular visits to the the child's
01:04:13.980maternal grandmother to just ensure that the child was always connected to their family of origin
01:04:19.500um and you know i i don't know if this is an option this is obviously very delicate and it's
01:04:25.860not for everyone but um i was just rereading andrew solomon's amazing new yorker piece it's
01:04:31.280actually about polygamy and polyamory and how polygamists in Mormon communities were sort of
01:04:39.860joining forces with lefty, you know, liberal polyamorists to get legal recognition of their
01:04:47.980relationships and, you know, be able to have multiple people, you know, on a home deed or
01:04:54.400have multiple parents recognized for a child and that kind of thing. Platonic co-parenting is
01:05:01.600becoming more of a thing. Maybe there's one in your life who is a solo parent and would
01:05:07.400love more than anything, you know, a person who's not just like uncle or auntie, but is really
01:05:14.560involved and wants to be close and really supportive of their child or, you know, a couple
01:05:21.920who wants that too. I mean, I think when I've read about communal living, that just seems to be
01:05:27.620the more parents, the better. And that's, you know, that's, that's something Alexis Pauline
01:05:35.700Gumbs, you know, has this idea of like being a cousin to every sentient being. Like they really
01:05:42.060emphasize that we are all connected to each other. And so maybe you can establish that connection
01:05:47.400with a child that's in your life already yeah no i think like i as part of my forthcoming book i've
01:05:54.320talked to so many people in those sorts of situations like have become legally another
01:06:01.340like person that is a guardian for a kid that like is not someone that they're the child of
01:06:07.520someone that they're dating or that sort of thing like it's just that they are essentially like
01:06:10.780now legal family to that child um and how meaningful that is like it's just incredible
01:06:17.520I had to have that because my father passed away when I was young so my mom needed to have
01:06:22.260a succession of legal guardians in case anything happened to her and I just yeah that's that's
01:06:28.520important and can be voluntary you know not come out of that sort of situation of duress but can be
01:06:35.320a very beautiful voluntary kind of expansive thing as well yeah and i think like when we talk about
01:06:42.100you know why people not having kids is a quote-unquote problem like what we're trying to
01:06:48.700get out here is like the world has become hostile to all of us right and when we try to make the
01:06:55.180world a better place to have kids we're really like it's universal design we're trying to make
01:06:58.820it a better place we're trying to make it a better place for all of us a family-friendly society is
01:07:03.940friendlier to all of us it's it's like social emotional psychological universal design
01:07:09.720and economic but yeah exactly i think it's the wheelchair it's the wheelchair ramp that's also
01:07:17.440a stroller ramp that's also a you've got your wheeled suitcase ramp um yeah we need to find
01:07:23.300that ramp for more ease in our relationships and more ability to care yeah and just like as we
01:07:30.200started at the beginning of this conversation like part of that means making a society where
01:07:36.900we have more time and care and resources to put towards family and community in whatever form that
01:07:46.520takes right and it doesn't have to be having a kid but it can be if that's what you want absolutely
01:07:53.140where can people find you if they want to hear more from you i am at anna louis s on instagram
01:07:59.880and I am a contributing opinion writer for the New York times. So I pop up there every now and
01:08:08.080then. Um, and I'm a freelance journalist. So I write for all, whoever will have me, as I say,
01:08:13.620read me at New York magazine, the cut, the new Republic, um, the Atlantic. Um, and thank you
01:08:20.900so much for having me. This was such a treat. This was my first podcast. So you did great.
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