Low birth rates are now raising concern across even our widening U.S. partisan and ideological divides. To a great extent, the birth dearth is a product of both decreasing marriage rates and climbing ages for marriage. Even today, fewer people getting married means fewer people having children; meanwhile, if those who do marry tie the knot in their 30s, they will have on average fewer children than they might have had if they had married in their 20s. So a big part of our failure to reach replacement-rate fertility is economic and cultural in the broadest sense.
Still, beyond these macro-level factors lies “the discourse”—the culturally produced and curated-yet-organic “vibes”—about what it means to be a mother in 2025.
What, for example, has so emphatically convinced the singer Chappell Roan that all her friends who have children are “in hell?” Why is Paige Connell, influencer and mother of four, most relatable to so many women when she talks about how she almost divorced her present, faithful husband because he was not carrying his share of the mental load that was breaking her? Where did a married, educated, early-30-something family friend of mine get the idea that being a good mom is so truly impossible that she’d best not even attempt it?
Moms and babies are great culture war fodder and great catalysts for various societal conversations and well-meaning exhortations. Yet, moms and babies do not always seem quite so interesting as actual people that we like and want more of. Perhaps in part as a result, decreasing numbers of women are open to (more) babies.
A handful of books published over the past few years get at the question of just what makes 21st-century motherhood so uniquely tough and comparatively unappealing when compared to the child-free life. Several attempt to offer some ideas about how to make having children less difficult and more joyful for women today.
I want to zero in on two of those books: Nancy Reddy’s The Good Mother Myth and Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children.
Reddy, a poet and academic with two children, explains in The Good Mother Myth how many of our ideas about what constitutes a good mother are and always have been nonsensical. A progressive invested in parental egalitarianism with her husband, she confronted, upon becoming a mother, the myriad ways in which not only our societal norms and practices but also our own internalized idea of ourselves as mothers militates against women’s well-being in motherhood.
Reddy interlaces her changing experience of motherhood with a history of changing American ideas about maternity, showing the shortcomings of the latter in the struggles of the former. “Our expectations of ‘the good mother,’” she observes, “have tended to expand right as women began to take up space formerly granted to men.” Toggling impressively between our national story of motherhood and her own, Reddy offers insightful, provocative food for thought about the ways in which we sanctify motherhood in order to privatize its labor.
Pakaluk, by contrast, takes the privatization of motherhood itself as a presupposition in Hannah’s Children. An economist and mother of eight, she interviews college-educated mothers of five or more children to answer an overlooked question: In a nation where most women are now having fewer children, why do some women with other options available to them have so many? Their collective answer is civic-minded in the deepest sense, in a way that may strike some as in contrast with Pakaluk’s controversial conviction that no public policy, only altered hearts and minds, can raise birth rates: “People are good for the world.”
Taken together, Reddy and Pakaluk reveal what I think could be a way toward happier motherhood of (marginally) more children. And I think that many people who read this review, as Jesuit-minded Catholics and contemplatives in action living both wholly in the faith and wholly in the world, are uniquely disposed to lead the way.
Beyond the Motherhood Myth
The introspective, self-denigrating rumination that initially ensnares Reddy as a new mom is made manifest by the elite subculture to which she belongs, which is an unnamed yet ever-present character in her narrative. Many secular women like Reddy find babies and maternity truly alien before becoming mothers themselves. “Girl boss” new moms enter a subculture of what seems like the world’s most demanding professional hobby feeling like amateurs. Reddy believed that she could “read and research my way into motherhood and that mother-love would be instant and alchemical, transforming me into a sweeter, gentler, endlessly patient version of myself” because that is how she approached all other professions and hobbies, waiting to become expert by way of gaining clinical expertise.
When women approach motherhood from this perspective, it is easy to become consumed with introspective questions about others’ perception of them as mothers: Am I mom enough to be all my child needs? Do I look effortless enough with my baby-wearing to impress passersby? Why haven’t my whole personality and all of my priorities changed because I am a mother? If they are perceptive, as Reddy is, they eventually realize that “there’s no way to actually be a good mother, and that that’s not what my kids need anyway,” and they reconcile themselves to the idiosyncratic reality of mothering particular people with specific, limited needs.
But an awareness that making motherhood feel easier might also make it more popular is curiously outside the scope of Reddy’s book. It is, dispiritingly, also outside the scope of the individualistic mainstream that many American women today inevitably inhabit.
Pakaluk, by contrast, interviews women who mostly hold that it does not matter whether their personalities and priorities are transformed by motherhood; raising children simply is the most useful, impactful and meaningful thing anyone can do with her time. This exhortation to view children and child-rearing as work of incomparable value—and the attendant argument that Americans would ultimately have to adopt this view en masse in order to meaningfully raise the birthrate, given women’s other options—is instructive, whether a reader has one child or 10.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Pakaluk’s insightful perspective just because it emerges from her own experience and those of her subjects as outliers: moms of five or more children conceived, broadly, on purpose. Nevertheless, it also bears mentioning that the last time American women averaged five children or more was around 1870. Realistically speaking, we are not going back to a distant world in which having five or more children is normative.
Ironically, those who see motherhood of one or two children as a high-stakes, commodified lifestyle choice largely share an expectation of maternity’s intrinsic rearrangement of the female heart and mind that is comparatively absent in those who see motherhood of five or more children as a sacred trust.
The self-abnegating, baby-centered, mother-as-angel image that plagues Reddy and her contemporaries has been reinvented many times over, but originates in 19th-century racism and classism. Before industrialization, nearly all women and men worked in the home. After industrialization, well-to-do white women kept thoroughly domestic, nonproductive homes while their husbands went out to work. But—as the formerly enslaved abolitionist Sojourner Truth memorialized in her 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, and the literary theorist bell hooks elaborated upon at length in her 1981 book by the same name—Black women, Irish immigrant women and poorer white women also went out to work. Like men.
With the separation of women from one another by race and class, “true womanhood” became synonymous with a reverence for the presumptive physical delicacy and attendant characterological purity of women who had the economic means to remain focused on their own homes, rather than working in the homes of others. Americans fetishized purity of maternal heart—what the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir would later call “the religion of maternity”—accordingly.
Most women’s lives today are shaped by the lockstep presumptions of disembodied feminism that Beauvoir idealized and that Reddy takes for granted. So female corporeality—its unique capacity and its attendant limitations—is widely considered negotiable. To embrace rather than reject motherhood in this context is to expect the body and its spirit to fall in line with the will and its plan, and to concomitantly expect society to do the same. In other words, the women who undertake motherhood as a morally neutral, commodified lifestyle choice rather than a godly, natural vocation tend to have outsized expectations of themselves and, ironically enough, of maternity.
All told, despite their professed distance from the religiously grounded expectations of traditional family life, secular women like Reddy often expect motherhood to transform their preferences and personalities exactly as 19th-century maternalism promised. When that does not happen—when they find baby care tedious and tiring—some blame their husbands and society for the internalized misogyny that still associates women with the primary parenthood that they themselves went into motherhood intending to embody until its endless, thankless labor was upon them.
Yes, I believe, contra Pakaluk, that we must make motherhood easier and family life more affordable. Many people—many Catholics—far more knowledgeable than I am have all kinds of ideas about how to do that. Still, Pakaluk is correct that any real will to invest in the American family begins with the acknowledgment that more motherhood of more children is not only economically necessary but also intrinsically good.
Our collective capacity to recognize this truth is inseparable from our willingness to accept at the same time that being a mother, even under ideal circumstances—whether the egalitarian utopia envisioned by Reddy or the traditionalist one embodied by those with opposing politics—will not radically reorder most women’s personalities for either the embrace of maximal motherhood or the introspective acceptance of even limited motherhood’s many inconveniences.
But what if we all thought less about being mothers and more about raising children? What if we focused on the children’s vocational raising instead of the mother’s rigid label? That is, what if we assumed that the understanding of motherhood espoused by Pakaluk is not just for those with basketball-team-sized families? Could we move beyond Reddy’s good mother myth, and just be good mothers?
For the Kids
Parents who have several children (or reflexively support those who do) often seem to deify motherhood less than those who live thoroughly within today’s secular mainstream of predominantly one- or two-child families.
Before I was expecting my fourth child, I had coffee with a friend who already had four, the oldest several years older than mine. She did not sugarcoat what I was in for, should my husband and I have another. “It’s really, really hard,” she said. She told me about juggling basic domestic tasks, kids’ sports and activities, aging grandparents, her own part-time job, and extensive involvement in the school that her kids and mine attend.
What kind of mother she is or hoped to be never came up because it’s not something she dwells on. She is, self-evidently, the kind of college-educated woman who chose to have four children despite myriad other options for how to spend her limited resources and time, and who is busy raising those four distinct future adults and immortal souls—simultaneously in the faith and in the world beyond.
The overlapping realities of those children and the context in which they are growing up is so rich with demands, reflection and wisdom in and of itself that there is no room to fantasize about any overarching theory of motherhood that will make everything fall magically into place. “Things don’t always go well, and that’s OK,” she told me. For her, motherhood is a particularized vocation to be holistically lived, not a commodified identity to be clinically curated.
When my fourth son was born, that same mom of four organized a meal train for my family. Several nights a week for more than two months, parish and school friends brought us homemade dinners. Other days, other friends and neighbors brought breakfasts and more dinners and diapers.
Unlike Reddy, I always knew that “I deserved help, that I wasn’t a failure for not floating through those early months of motherhood unscathed.” Why? Because everyone around me treated the new baby not as a project they were happy to aid me in undertaking, but as a person with inestimable value of his own whose care they were delighted to support. In other words, at the bottom of all the love and kindness I was blessed to receive when my fourth son was born were two simple assumptions: First, a new baby is a good thing; second, taking care of a family with several busy children and a new baby is a hard thing.
The understanding that there is no contradiction between these premises constitutes the closest thing I can think of to realistic, child-centered pronatalism in today’s world.
Yes, the fertility crisis is a profound problem that requires systemic solutions, both economic and cultural. No, thinking less about the “experience of motherhood” and more about all the discreet, idiosyncratic experiences that comprise the multifaceted lives of both mothers and children would not fix things all by itself. But it might help a few more women welcome a few more babies.
And at least that would be a few steps in the right direction.
This article appears in February 2026.
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