I lament that women return to their jobs so quickly after giving birth (I mean mostly women in marriages and families of sufficient means, as working class women rarely have a choice today; these aren't the 1950s when a working class man could support a large family on his income alone). Children require a couple years with their mothers at least. I can understand the desire to do things other than raise children, but small children are a full-time job. Sadly, it's one that no longer has the esteem it once had and that it truly deserves. Even the phrase "stay-at-home mom" is kind of an underhanded slight against motherhood, as if it's something worse or inferior, less desirable. Motherhood is the bosom, the nursery of humanity! What contempt for humanity to look down on motherhood!

Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a mother, or a mother who raises them, but to intentionally deprive children of motherhood is criminal. Think about what the child might internalize about their importance.

Some talk about not wanting to be treated like baby-making machines. Well, procreation is not just about giving birth, but raising the child, and so if you delegate the responsibility of raising your children to someone else and not out of dire necessity, then does that not make you like the very thing you sought not to become?

In the last 50 years or so, we've become extremely narrow-minded in this respect. It's "career or nothing!" Life is far richer, and never mind that careers are in the service of something and someone. If all is career, then what good is a career? If motherhood is lesser than, then humanity is lesser than, and where does that leave careers?

Now, I don't think capitalism, industrialization, or urbanization are the problem here. It's a bit like using "inequality" as a proxy for other things (income inequality is not a problem as such, but people often use it as a proxy for other things). We also tend to look for external causes, like systems, when the problem is spiritual and from which systems emerge, and people lose interest as soon as you say that because it involves taking stock of your own corruption. And these corruptions manifest as and are transmitted through culture. Consumerism is one example. We have made the primary purpose of life to spend. Now, I like variety and material wealth, but I detest consumerism, this awful religion that worships material wealth, divinizes commodities, turns sex into a commodity, a medium of exchange, and an "experience" instead of a procreative act. What do children do? They eat into your budget, which means you can buy less stuff. They are antithetical to consumerism. And when sexual intercourse becomes commodified, then it become sterile. There is your demographic decline.

I also don't especially like putting bandages on the status quo that supposedly make staying at home longer possible or easier, certainly not as a long term solution, as this only serves to reinforce and preserve the root of corruption and the consumerist system. It's like going into debt because you live beyond your means because you have a warped sense and priority of value, and then saying "We've got a problem: we're out of money. Let's borrow more to cover these debts and have more to spend." We're engaged in a spiritual Ponzi scheme, a death spiral, and the only way out is to bite the bullet and face our corruption. Only then, with a lot of spiritual bone breaking and pain, will we manage to get to a better place. People don't want to hear that. They want to close their eyes to the oncoming train. They want to keep going down the path of destruction either because they're addicted to it, they don't know any better, or they fear the pain of switching tracks.

But a reckoning will happen, and is already happening. We can either start migrating to a new way now, or suffer the course correction (possibly extinction) later, but it will happen.