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Simply keep the old folks of your family around. It is not uncommon around the world to have a young married couple live with their parents. The grandparents provide help with taking care of the children and also benefit from social contact into old age.
There are many issues with corporations entering into competitions with families by providing maternity leave, abortion services, paying in excess single women while keeping married men wages' low...
Moreover corporations have also created a market out of the elderly, with cruises, independent communities, reverse mortgages to make sure that there is no estate to leave to descendants...
We will just have to wait for a few decades for the Amish, Mexicans, Mormons and Chinese to solve the issue in the US.
I'm getting ready to have kids in the next few years, all but one of my grandparents(out of 6, father had two pairs due to divorce and remarry) has passed on. This option doesn't really exist for many. Not to mention I have siblings so who gets my dad to live with them and help them raise kids?
Well there should be 4 sets of grandparents.
Unfortunately few people can be blessed with 1 or 2 grandparents both willing and able to help with child care or household maintenance.
If your siblings have children, you should consider forming some kind of compound where childcare, yard work or even cooking can be collectivized.
I plan to either arrange marriages or at the very least instruct my children to look at the family of a potential suitor, as it can not only reveal potential problems like mental illness or criminal behavior but is also important for the environment my grandchildren will get.
Organized religion makes a lot of sense when you start having kids, as a successful church will basically provide you with older, experienced, trustworthy people to accompany you in the difficult times.
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This is the whole WEIRD/Hajnal thing. In western individualistic culture, kids are expected to move out onto their own very early, and the expectation is different in less individualistic cultures. Compare, for example, how often people in their twenties live with their parents in Sweden vs Spain or southern Italy. This goes back centuries, heavy parental involvement in lives of young married couples has simply not been a thing in the West for a long time now.
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This is the uncommon part, in the west. Not the old parents.
From my experience, mostly from mom groups on social media, American women get very little help after the birth. Some will even attack others for lamenting that their immediate family does not provide much or any help postpartum. 'I didn't need any help I'm a strong independent woman' kind of talk. Meanwhile immigrant women have their mom or other relatives take care of their household for a month while they recover.
There is a lot of emotion before the first child, for the cute baby, a lot of very tiny outfits gifted at the baby shower, fewer outfits for the later ages, and then the attention dies down and people don't want to help.
Yeah this is the reason I never want to have children. I've seen some peers have kids and their social lives, hobbies, etc are essentially over. I try to babysit for my family but have my own priorities, I do feel bad about it at least.
Problem is when you take out the extended family and make hypermobility the norm, you get this vicious cycle where not having enough family around makes people not want to have kids, not having kids reduces the amount of family around. Not sure how we escape.
The Amish, Mormons, Mexicans and Chinese will figure it out as the urbanites go extinct.
Demography is destiny. There are only so many parents willing to sacrifice their kids to LGBTQUP+ gods in public schools.
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