Also from a world where the ability of women to access decently paying jobs outside the home was heavily restricted to one approaching equality. Motherhood is one choice of many, with negative pay.
Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
It fits with everything in the rich world, especially the west, especially the US which is - replacing family/community/social/etc systems with pay-as-you-go solutions. And this is one of many areas it falls apart.
One of the major unspoken costs of having hotbeds of industry and the opportunity cost associated for not being in those hotbeds. Hotbeds are great for the entrepreneur but it still costs a hell of a lot in other ways that would otherwise enrich society.
