I think this is an excellent point. I've had a similar thought: we've made societies where nothing gets done without paying for it, and where it's financially

I think this is an excellent point. I've had a similar thought: we've made societies where nothing gets done without paying for it, and where it's financially incredibly hard to be a parent without both parents working near 100%. Yet having kids is basically an essential service to society. With most things in our economy, we don't expect things to happen without paying for it. So why do we expect parents to do free labor, taking from whatever extremely limited free time they have left to raise kids? Is it really that surprising that people aren't having kids? When women was expected to stay at home and manage the house and raise kids, you essentially had a lot of dedicated labor to raise kids. They weren't paid, but the wages and the costs in society was such that the father could support the family on his wage alone. We need to realize that if you want someone to raise 5+ kids (which is a necessity if some people have 0 kids), that's really a full time job until all the kids are of school age, and it should be paid as such. Obviously, we shouldn't return to what we had before. We should pay the parent directly instead of it going through the husband, and in todays society it can be either mom or dad that stays home.