How does the rest of the world manage to have enormous families (by our standards) without childcare service and on a much smaller income?
In the US the typical "middle class" child raising experience is utterly miserable. There is very little expectation in the rest of the world to end your life as you know it just because you had kids.
Family, friends, even the community all sort of collectively engage in child rearing. In the US it's gone down this relentless road of sequestering oneself off from society whilst simultaneously being expected to devote your entire existence to child rearing or be seen as a bad person.
This is a topic I've thought a lot on and have my ideas of what caused it, but it's really not for a place like HN :)
1. Having social norms or laws that force women to stay at home.
2. Having large economic inequality to make the cost of childcare services affordable to certain families.
2) Lower standards for supervision of children - as it was in the US in the 1970's, it's considered normal not to know where your 9-year-old is or what they're up to between breakfast and dinnertime.
3) Lower penalties for leaving the workforce for several years to take care of infants and toddlers - jobs that don't involve career progression or even necessarily what we'd consider formal employment (e.g. people working in their own fields or small market stalls).