> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)

This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.

> It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).

Why would it be easier today?

You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.

This. I know me and all my peers roamed the neighborhood and my wife's life was not that different despite being born on different continents. Doing the same now risks a visit from state child neglect referral, which is enough to give most a pause. Parents seem to get all the risk and less benefits, while getting the stink eye when kid is not behaving properly.

In short, I am entirely confused on what would be easier today. If anything, things have gotten exponentially worse.. if you care enough to do it right.

> You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner.

Still works this way in my suburban Ohio world

> today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.

though yes I see this in the childhood sport arena, club teams, traveling teams, etc.

>Still works this way in my suburban Ohio world

I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion... but to be blunt I've only seen this in black and impoverished neighborhoods. There needs to be enough working single moms releasing their kid out of necessity that the Karens can't snitch on everyone and the police/CPS fatigue of fielding the calls after investigating and not finding anyone they can force into keeping the kids inside.

Kids aren't dying in childbirth, for one.

Well sure, that doesn't really make parenting itself easier/harder.

Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids.

Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade.

And because of this, consumption in key categories has improved. For example:

Housing floor space per person, same trend.

Life expectancy, same trend.

Leisure has increased.

Tourism has increased.

Yet the common discussion is that it is unaffordable or impossible to have kids. It's backwards. My grandparents were dirt poor and each came from families with 8-10 people. I'm comparatively very rich and have no kids. The explanation that it's so unaffordable I think is mostly wrong. It's that not having kids for many people is a better deal than before.

The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se, but rather opportunity cost is too high.

As an example I just came back from travelling the world for six months. I'm rich enough to do that. Which also means the opportunity cost is so great, that it's a lot to sacrifice to have kids. My grandparents had none of that opportunity cost precisely because they weren't rich.

> The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se

Deopends on country and social support Id say?

In western EU countries, parental-costs are estimated to 180.000 - 200.000 EUR per head that parents will pay for the first 25 years.

Will pay because these societies can afford it. If they had 10k they're not spending 200k, period.

That's the whole point in these affordability discussions.

Take homes, We often speak of homes being so expensive, $1m average in Silicon Valley or whatever. That's not because it's unaffordable, but precisely because for the people who bought these homes, they were able to afford $1m or whatever the number is. If people there could only afford $500k, they'd be 500k.

If it's 200k it's because that's what we can and believe should spend. And that's completely different from the past, when we could spend less, and decided we should spend less. My grandparents generation for example who had 5-10 kids certainly wasn't spending 1-2m on their children.

Fact is that median income has gone way up, while children per person went way down. We thus have more to spend per child, we can afford MORE, to spend more. And the fact that we do (evidenced by the 200k per child figure), is not evidence of unaffordability, to the contrary!

> post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke

No fluke. A deliberate policy

There's certainly some flukiness to being the only major country on the planet that hadn't been shelled and bombed to smithereens in the preceding decades. That's not the whole story, but it's certainly part of it.

We can't return to a place where America is the only manufacturing country in the world, where every other country is in ruins and rebuilding and taking loans from America. That was a very weird set of circumstances that gave America unprecedented tailwinds that no other country has ever had.