[6stringmerc]

>At the heart of the problem is an educational ethos that prizes building self-esteem over academic attainment.

I'm not going to argue this assertion, because I think it's a valid one, but I would like to give it context that the author is seemingly lacking:

As a generalization spanning several decades, parents aren't interested in being parents and in turn the provenance of their responsibilities at home - discipline, ethics, morals, codes of conduct - have been transitioned to that of either the School System or LEOs in more extreme cases.

I submit it's nearly impossible to be both an academic task-master and an emotional development coach at the same time and expect both of them to excel in all scenarios where the provider is a Civic Organization of some sort (e.g. school system).

After all, it's a bunch of adults promoting the self-esteem bandwagon for these past few decades, not the kids. I wholly encourage Mr. Astill to join his local PTA and begin to address his long-term concerns with the root of the problem. I say this rather tongue in cheek, because actually doing something about the issue in one's one neighborhood is a lot harder than sitting down and writing about it (as a writer, believe me I know).

[zanny]

This touches on something nobody wants to acutally acknowledge or talk about. There is some subconscious shifts taking place - marriage later or not at all, fewer kids per household, etc - but fundamentally raising children is a ton of work. It is its own job, possibly in a class of its own in difficulty or at least rivaled by almost any other profession.

But society and culture just expects the job of you. Do it, don't be trained to do it, and probably worse of all do not organize society around promoting those who are best at it. In any other disciple if you are amazing at it you should expect gainful employment carrying it out. And there is a dramatic difference between parenting and caretaking or teaching. And even those have really bad real world metrics to gauge success, given by how often sitters or teachers can perform poorly.

But you don't solve this problem when you shove down every adults throat how not having children means they are a failure as a person, combined with the expectation that they should both be good parents and have an independent second (or first) career.

Being a parent is its own job. Throughout history, humans have consistently dedicated tremendous amounts of absolute hours of its adult population to the raising of children. Societies often organized around the subjugation of an entire sex to do the job. It is crucial for the wellbeing and long term prosperity of current and future generations people accept that reality.