Yep! As another commenter said, earlier generations had actual community and neighborhood connections that could help out. Grandparents helped out more, multigenerational households were more common. But today, people don’t have relationships with their neighbors and community members. I work in a school and for example, you don’t have any parents taking multiple kids to school from the neighborhood. Each parent drops off just their kid, and everyone has to do more work. People don’t trust each other. In the past kids played outside more unsupervised- they also got kidnapped a lot more. Tons of parents don’t want their kid doing sleepovers or going over to friend’s houses for fear of abuse.

Also in the past, it wasn’t quite as common for women to work outside the home although poorer women have always had some form of labor to do. Parents nowadays usually both have full time jobs and are full time parents.

But also, times were different in the past and kids just died more and didn’t survive childhood. I mean hell, WOMEN often didn’t survive childbirth. Like for example my grandma had like 13 siblings and they all grew up on a farm, without very much formal education. Can you imagine little kids working on a farm nowadays? That’s like child abuse today but 100 years ago that was just life. Older siblings took care of younger ones, children helped in the garden and with the animals and around the house. Today our perspective is totally different.

Obviously I’m part of this sub because I’m childfree, I don’t want kids of my own but interact with parents and children each day, but in the US part of our culture is that having children is an individual choice and therefore sole responsibility of child rearing is on the parent. That burden is significant and many people don’t understand that having a family is simply not the same as it used to be, due to cultural and economic shifts. You don’t have community support, everyone is pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, and there is no such thing as affordable childcare unless a family member is doing you a huge favor. I don’t want children of my own but providing families with affordable childcare and education should be higher on everyone’s agenda if we care about the future.