We have a societal problem when the rational individual choice (to provide your children the best head start) is to wait until your fertility declines to have children.
It's a choice in the same sense that I've chosen not to buy a Ferrari because I can't afford one.
In fact, I think it's precisely our wealth that scares people about the prospect. You're going to have to trade away some of that wealth to have children and people are understandably nervous about that.
Quite a lot of them died in childbirth.
An example of this is that freezing your eggs costs upwards of $30k, and is still viewed as something only very select late 30's successful women do.
Isn't that also very unreliable ? When we went to IVF clinic they told us that freezing the eggs has much lower chance of them being usable compared to fertilized eggs.
AFAIK it has been shown many times that "career woman" is absolutely not a trait men find attractive.
So girls grow up with a career-oriented mindset, and don't do any careful thinking about what they want, or think about kids/family as something they will do "later" or "when I'm ready" and before they know it they find themselves at 35 years old and unable to get pregnant.
The main exception I can think is family support; having younger grandparents and great grandparents could be an advantage, I guess?
I'm not sure I'd look at a society where people have lots of children so they can put them to work and say "yeah, this is the way society should be!"
When I was born in 1991 and my sister in 1995, a simple police officer and a nurse in half-time could provide for two children with ease, in one of what was even back then one of the most expensive cities in Germany. Today, me (IT worker) and my s/o (public health administration) can barely afford a flat and two cats.
Fuck that shit, we need rent controls, higher wages and higher taxes on the rich. Then people like me are not forced to wait until 35 that they can start having children.
Energy, on the other hand, not so.
Interestingly, genetic mutations from the mother are roughly constant regardless of her age. Paternal genetic mutations rise with age. IIRC a 38 year old man's sperm has double the number of mutations a 28 year old man has.
> Ireland's average age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.47 for men where they had once been about 21 and 25, respectively, and only about 10% of adults remained unmarried;[22] in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7;[23][24] in the decades after the Great Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men and as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage.
Doesn't really contradict what I said, although the age gap between bride and groom was fairly variable (but no country that I'm aware of has a pattern of older bride, younger groom).