[salmonfamine]

Yes, exactly. This is what I'm trying to get at with "market failure" -- the total economic cost of doing all of that is drastically higher than even the cost of just childcare.

In the past, many of those duties would be distributed throughout a community. And on isolated farms, parents would intentionally have big families so that the eldest could help raise the younger kids.

Doing it all with two people is a huge burden. Doing it with just one is a heroic act. Throwing in the extra burdens and expectations of the upper-middle class professional world -- homework help, extracurriculars, etc -- makes it virtually impossible.

So it makes sense that only the 500k+ income crowd is having big families. That's probably a good approximation of the income required to afford the total cost of replacing all of the childcare benefits of an informal community with paid labor.