[lazide]

There are massive issues with hiding the real challenges with children from potential mothers and fathers.

I suspect it's a combination of:

1) Prior/older parents worried about embarrassment or being shamed for going through what they did - a lot of it things that no one likes to talk about.

2) Folks worried (potentially correctly) that many folks would opt to not have kids, which is already a population problem, if they understood what it really meant.

It's the same about War and men returning from it, frankly, though war movies tend to be a lot more glamourous, even the gritty ones.

[ghostpepper]

I think 1 could also be parents actively forgetting how hard it was. I think I even read a theory that the mother's brain releases chemicals during childbirth that help her remember it as "not so bad"

I also suspect that older generations were less isolated socially and it was much more common to have parents/grandparents/cousins/etc in the same house who could care for the baby for an hour while mom caught up on sleep. It takes a village to raise a child but we have no more villages, so people try to do it on their own and discover it's incredibly difficult.