Recently, I recommended a wonderful book about large families to a friend, a mother of seven. “Is it dark? Depressing?” she asked, clearly wanting none of that. “No,” I told her. “It’s a book filled mostly with joy.”
With a doctorate in economics from Harvard University and years of teaching and research behind her—she’s currently a professor at the Busch School of Business, a branch of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.—Catherine Ruth Pakaluk followed her longtime interest in demographics and began wondering why, in a time when American families are shrinking and birth rates are well below replacement levels, 5 percent of women in our country buck this trend and have large families.
