Recently, a woman told me something incredible: Late at night, she was up late doing something similar and searched, “Should I have a fifth child?” She came across an article I wrote for Deseret Magazine several years ago about our decision to have a fifth. She was influenced, and that fifth child arrived several months ago.

Another woman recently messaged me and asked, “Have you read Hannah’s Children?” This mother of three shared with me, “I am in my own personal struggle of making the decision to have more. My heart wants. I am enjoying this book sent to me by a friend of four.” The book, she felt, was her friend’s way of pushing her to take the leap into the maternity ward another time.

Hannah’s Children, a collection of interviews with women who have chosen to defy the birth dearth and have five or more children, has become, according to author Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, something of an underground phenomenon. It has been widely and positively reviewed in legacy media, an incredible feat for a book that positively profiles large family life.

In her review of the book, Emma Green wrote for the New Yorker that Pakaluk was “making the case for large families.” This is a framing that Pakaluk herself rejects, telling me, “I don’t make the case at all. I just describe women who make that choice. … What’s interesting to me is that merely describing a lifestyle of openness to more kids comes across as making a case, or an invitation to have more kids.”

In a way, Pakaluk’s book does in words what I was looking for online: She shows people the real picture of big family life in clear detail for many different families. There are Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish families, all offering readers a window into their lives.

The rapid collapse of births in this country is creating a snowball effect: People are encountering children less and less frequently, both in public and in their families, and have no idea what kids are actually like. For example, recently, a cashier at Trader Joe’s handed my 3-year-old son a mini cactus after she rang it up at the register. It was clear she had never really encountered a toddler before, though she was smitten with him during their interactions. With all of the negative publicity that children get, it’s hard to remember that children are actually very cute and delightful unless you encounter them with some regularity.

The decision whether to have children has with it an element of social contagion. While writing my piece for Deseret Magazine in 2021, I spoke with Catholic comedian Jennifer Fulwiler about how becoming a part of a high-fertility Catholic community cemented her decision to have six children after being raised as an only child. She explained, “I needed role models and being part of Catholic culture … suddenly I saw highly intelligent and educated women having six and seven kids. I really didn’t know that was a thing.”

She went on to explain that she believed women who had a lot of children had different interests and that to be a woman who has a lot of children, you have to be fascinated by childrearing and homemaking. I thought you had to be Mary Poppins and Susie Homemaker to want a large family. Her Catholic friends showed her the many different ways you can be a mother of many, and they made it look within reach for someone who didn’t pride herself on domesticity.

Pakaluk’s publisher, Regnery, is a conservative imprint, but Hannah’s Children isn’t remotely political. While several books recently have examined the birth crisis, such as the Washington Examiner’s own Timothy P. Carney’s Family Unfriendly, from a policy-heavy perspective, Pakaluk is doing something few conservatives are able to do successfully: harnessing the power of pure narrative, which she explained was part of the impulse behind using people’s voices and stories.

And it’s working. Similar to the message I received from the woman on the fence about having another baby, since Hannah’s Children was published, Pakaluk has received correspondence from both men and women who have shared how their hearts were changed by her narratives. One man emailed after Pakaluk appeared on a podcast discussing her book to explain how the conversation was a tipping point in his family’s decision to have at least one more child: “It’s so so so so refreshing to hear an everyday positive encouragement and reinforcement of family, versus the endless spewing of guilt, shame and ridicule from the Left of ‘why would you ever want a family?’”

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In our conversations, Pakaluk compared her book to documentaries about mountain climbing. She explained, “You just document that some people love this and find it worth doing, and portray it in a kindly, sympathetic light, and people almost inherently take it as an invitation to join in … The view of childbearing that my subjects have definitely calls forth a desire to join in. I think.”

I think so, too.

Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.