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Globally, the main thing is that married families have transitioned from small farm cooperatives (where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house)
by bmcusick 9y ago
Globally, the main thing is that married families have transitioned from small farm cooperatives (where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house) to market-based work for both of them. The problem with market based work is that it's usually incompatible with keeping one eye on small children, unlike the household chores of a farm. Also, kids are pure burdens until they can join the market themselves, whereas farm kids could help collect eggs and feed chickens starting pretty young.
In America at least the cost disease of education, housing, and healthcare all make it worse, but the first part is the primary culprit. And I'm not sure there's any fix for it besides long parental leaves and subsidized childcare.
- TremendousJudge 9y ago>where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house Back in the day, everyone worked the fields. The men, the women, and the children. Especially in times of harvest, the more hands, the better
- xyzzyz 9y agoBack in the day, in the farming days, people still had only 2 children on average survive to the adulthood — the population growth only really took off after industrial revolution. The biggest problem back then was that having more than 2 children impoverished them in the long run — it ensured that each kid had less land to farm than their parents. If you kept having above replacement fertility rate for a while, after a few generations the descendants had no land to farm, and with few alternatives afforded by technology-less society, this meant absolute poverty and starvation.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoAs somebody who collected eggs and fed pigs at a very young age, it would have been much faster and more efficient for Dad to do it himself. :)
- bmcusick 9y agoBuddy, may I introduce you to the concept of comparative advantage? :-)