[nebula8804]

>We went from a western world where one salary could support a partner and 3 children, to a world where to two full-time salaries are barely enough for one child.

This is an exceptional time in history that required most of the world to be in a broken state (WW2/post-colonialism) while the people you describe benefited from this arrangement. Now that this arrangement is going away, reality is setting in.

[everforward]

That's not true at all. Large families have been common throughout the history of humanity for a number of reasons. Lack of birth control, economic output of children, ensuring at least one child survives to take care of the parents in old age were common reasons.

Women in the 1800s had an average of ~3.5 children that lived past 5 (about 4.5 children total, but child mortality was much higher in the 1800s). We're presently hovering a little under 2. The 1950s did have a spike up to ~2.5, but was still lower than the 1800s.

Small families are an oddity in human history. "Support" also meant something very different back then too, though. People still might be able to support 3.5 children on a single salary if they were also willing to live by 1800s standards.

[mc32]

>People still might be able to support 3.5 children on a single salary if they were also willing to live by 1800s standards.

People are currently able to. There are populations in the US where some demographics do have higher averages and definitely there are individual families where people do have 4 children. It's not common, but not too rare either and they aren't "affluent". Many are the opposite of affluent.