Which is quite remarkable, because up until less than a century ago when women “entered the workforce” virtually every woman who had ever lived somehow managed to care for her 3+ children.
Incidentally, large families do scale sublinearly with respect to the parents. The reason why is that even with merely natural spacing by the time they have a fourth child, the oldest is in a position to provide significant assistance. Every mother with a large family that I’ve spoken to confirms that the difficulty peaks with the third child and then plateaus.
It is remarkable. I have one child, and it is by far the hardest thing I've ever done - far harder than any job I've had. It doesn't help that both parents are working full time. Maybe parenting has changed recently and we are too hands-on, but I can't imagine having 2, much less 3+ running around. Even if one of us stops working to raise the kids full time, it's way more taxing, physically and mentally, than working a white collar job and paying for child care.
I recall before we lived in nuclear families [somewhat recent phenomenon] communal raising was commonplace. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, neigbours, etc. would come help.
