> Daycare: children used to be tended to by family members or religious communities. Now we isolate ourselves from family by moving far away, don't join communi

> Daycare: children used to be tended to by family members or religious communities. Now we isolate ourselves from family by moving far away, don't join communities (religious or otherwise), and for whatever reason don't ask mom and dad for help with the kids. Also, the age at which we trust children to stay at home without supervision has risen over time. These are all choices we're making that make children much more expensive. It used to also be fairly common for the mother of the children to be tending to them, until the more recent trend of the mother working and paying someone else to do it. Gets especially expensive when there's more than one child. It was also more common for the mother to be married when having children [1], which helps allow for that. [1] https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-in-percentage-of-births-outside-marriage-among-whites-hispanics-and-women-with-higher-education-levels https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-i...