Here are few excerpts from Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s book, Hannah’s Children. Dr Pakaluk is an economist and professor at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. The book includes many interviews with women who have chosen to have large families.

From page 303 where she quotes Lisa:

One of my twins, the boy, had a really bad bout with depression and anxiety when he was about eight or nine. And it was this sixth baby that turned him around-just having this little person that loved him unconditionally and that he could love unconditionally. And it ws, the baby was the turning point.

It was a scary, dark, dark place. And we’d be working with counselors and trying to get his meds right and trying to figure things out and he’d really not made much progress for months and months and months.

And when we broght this baby [home], I mean, I just, I can see clearly just him even coming to the hospital and cradling that baby in his arms and just feeling that peace right for the first time-just for me as a mom, watching this boy, with my own anxiety about how are we going to help him get through this, to just see that peace come over him, and holding the baby.

And they’ve been really close, really sweet buddies from the very beginning. The baby he, I mean, he loves [my elder son]. They have a special bond and just to have someone that [my elder son] could love and that would love him back with no judgment at all, and not care what his behavior had been.

It just didn’t matter. He could love on that baby. It was healing for him.

. . . . {more to be added}