The notion of limiting number of children is a side effect of the industrial revolution.
People in crowded housing, in crowded cities, must compete for limited number of jobs, and their pay is in meager coins. They’re separated from their food & must buy it.
Too many mouths to feed/ not enough coins = poverty.
In agrarian society, more children were an asset, not a liability.
Land + children = wealth.
Since families depended DIRECTLY on the land for their food,
more kids= more little farmhands!
More tilling, more planting & harvesting, more canning, drying, “putting up” for next season, more cows could be milked, tended, etc.
Yes and no. I know poor people with large families here in suburban Boring. They have a lot of kids in a few rooms (like I do), and sometimes not just kids but grandparents, aunts and uncles, in-laws who just got here from Mexico or El Salvador. Everyone who is old enough to work, works, and contributes to the household. Grandmothers or sister-in-law provide childcare and cook for everyone, even if they’re not all living in the same house.
When my oldest son got his first job as a lifeguard, a friend from Guatemala said, “Great! Now he can help the family!” *jaw drop* We did not need Bill the Son’s minimum-wage earnings to help feed the household, although we did, eventually, charge him rent as an incentive to move out.
“Are you really going to pay me $500 a month to share a bedroom with Tom and a bathroom with eight other people? Come ON!” No, he wasn’t. He got a roommate, an apartment, and a cat.