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I think that modern lifestyles and family structure make it particularly difficult to raise children for a number of reasons. In a nuclear family there are only two adults doing all of the childcare, at least when they aren't paying for daycare services, as opposed to an extended family or multifamily household where the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents can take turns being responsible for all of the young children, giving their parents a much-needed break. There's a reason "it takes a village to raise a child" is a well-known saying, and yet the way we live nowadays does everything possible to prevent this.
Immigrant families tend to be larger in part because they often have no qualms about packing a dozen or more people into a single suburban house that was intended for a single nuclear family (packing is not really the right word, given that this is often still more living space per person than they get back home) and can alternate who gets groceries, does household chores, and takes the kids out to the park, not to mention living in a much nicer neighborhood than if they had not pooled their resources.
Additionally, growing up in a larger household means greater exposure to young children and their needs. More and more upper-middle class women in developed countries have never even held a baby before they have their first child, which adds an additional layer of anxiety at the weight of that responsibility that is simply absent in most traditional societies, where her equivalent would have from an early age been cooking for, keeping an eye on, and picking up after her younger siblings, cousins, or the neighbors' kids. The last vestige of this was teenagers working as babysitters to earn a little money in high school, which may still be a thing in some parts of this country, but certainly not in my coastal, urban, PMC, zoomer bubble.
Now I don't necessarily think that addressing these issues would immediately restore fertility rates, because there is a deeper challenge born (heh) out of the number of desirable lifestyle options that the wealth of developed countries permits other than raising a traditional family. I leave sorting that one out to natural selection, which is working overtime on it as we speak.
Perhaps the problem is we haven't rejected trad lifestyles enough. Need to accelerate the gay space communism more. If we graduated from polycule cohabs to polycule cohabs with kids we can keep our depraved lifestyles while having a network of lovers around to help with the the child rearing.
Before you say there's no precedent for this allow me to bring up the Eskimo.
Eskimo didn't have much privacy huddled together in their igloos during winters and it came with somewhat corresponding social mores: intimate moments that couldn't be hidden, more partner sharing, seeming indifference to cuckolding, comfort raising kids communally. Also apparent dedicated sex parties.
We could be missing a pretty big prize here by being insufficiently freaky with our modern ways.
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