True and that's seen in many societies. It's a huge cause of the falling birth rate. Many parents simply don't have the resources to raise multiple children.
But frankly in past generations for the vast majority investment in the education and development of children was almost non-existent. treating children seriously and investing in their development was a luxury only a few could afford, and only a tiny few of them bothered to do so.
Nowadays with universal public education the base level of education of most children is orders of magnitude better resourced, but of course still fairly generic. We just don't bother to add much on top of that, mostly.
While abundance has increased, so have the burdens on the parent. Both of them have to get jobs, there's no longer a grandmother in the house to help with the cooking and cleaning, the community is more individualistic so you can't just have someone watch out for your child for a couple hours.
And on top of that the constant app distractions that keep you from focusing on your children create a completely different set of challenges than what our grandparents had.
For example, do you think the US has an obesity problem and Japan doesn't because, by pure chance, there are far more people who "choose" to eat unhealthy in the US?
Who is gong to punish you for spending more time with your kids, introducing them to interesting people, maybe hiring tutors, even home schooling? People in our society today do all of those things. Nobody punishes them. The discourse around this is veering into the fantastical. We’re human beings in free societies. We get to choose.
It’s as though a lot of the commenters here, members of some of freest and most prosperous societies that have ever existed, have somehow managed to completely abandon the concept of individual responsibility.
Consider for a moment that you are a social animal. For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say that just means you're an animal that can't function long without being a part of N others like yourself. Also, let's add that there is some variance in behavior in all of these animals.
Also consider that the environment of these groups is not the same and the environment of the group has an effect on the group.
Okay run this experiment for T time based off those assumptions.
Some simple questions to ask: - If you took an individual from one group and plopped them over to another group with a different environment would you expect a difference in their behavior? - If you took an individual from some T and plopped them over to another some other T* (T* >> T) would you expect them to make different choices?
Okay this point you may feel that this is all condescending and what I'm doing here is a strawman of your original points with some nonsense assumptions.
You may feel like this whole speaking around words like "freedom" is dumb because you believe, as I believe, there is a thing called freedom and humans possess this thing. But that's our religion, we made a leap of faith to this freedom concept. Why force this model on others? It's not binary, there's a lot variations on this idea of freedom.
The thing is, I would argue as the others in this thread have implied that, we are not just born into this world, we are also born out of it.
If you follow this thought it gets really hard to buy this discourse as "veering into the fantastical". Because you have to ask what is a free society? To what extent can a society be free?
Plenty of people in society act contrary to the norms. In fact modern developed societies are incredibly diverse relative to the way they were a few generations ago in terms of lifestyle choices. Individual people do have agency, do have the power to choose and many of them exercise it.
Do again it comes down to responsibility. Averages are a measurement of outcome, not a determinant of it for individuals in the sample.
Fair enough, but I care less about how to apportion moral blame for society's collective failings, and more about how to fix it, into a society able to sustain itself and produce exceptional children.
Reducing this to “choices” ignores the cultural reality surrounding those choices, and obscures that while they may not be bounded by hard imposed limits, they’re still effectively limits for many people.
At best you can move to another location, but that means losing your family's presence. These were the default previously and no choice was needed.
On the other hand - a lot of the benefits of increased productivity from more women entering the workforce have gone to skyrocketing costs in the housing, healthcare and higher education sectors.
Imagine a game where every adult earns the same wage, there are 10 homes for rent and 11 families bidding on them. The equilibrium would be all adults in all families working, as they couldn't make rent without it.
The "resource" for raising multiple children in their grandparents' world was a stay-at-home mother
The resource for raising multiple children now is tons of cash
So did my wifes' and pretty much everyone in that generation that I know of.
They didn't travel or party much that's for sure.
Labour participation was about equal for men and women (i.e. excluded students and pensioners).
FTFY
People with least resources breed most.
At least among the middle class income range, extra money don't cause extra children.
People choose "better life" in lieu of procreation.