I'll second your opinion about raising children outside the West, but from Russia - due to relatively great childcare options (a hold over from the Soviet days,

I'll second your opinion about raising children outside the West, but from Russia - due to relatively great childcare options (a hold over from the Soviet days, when women were tasked en masse to rebuild the country after the massive casualties of soldiers in WWII [1], and the infrastructure to support that had to be rolled out reliably and systematically), it seems to me that my own peers in Russia are less conflicted about children, and less fixated on this psychoanalytic conviction that every single thing one does will potentially create trauma for a lifetime. When visiting my family, I noticed most adults were married and with children by the early twenties - but they didn't put their life on hold! They continued their degrees (men and women both) and careers, children in hand. Someone told me the equivalent of "it's just children, what's the big deal?" when I asked about it. Note this was after the reversal of the decrease in fertility trend of the early 2000s. [2] I came away with the impression that my Russian colleagues are mostly correct. We have been working and fighting for survival for eons - the entirety of human history! And it is only in the last couple of hundred years that we developed this idea that a child is precious and fragile, and a parent must be nothing short of perfect lest they raise a monster. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia