Earlier quoted context omitted.
My great grand mother gave birth to 16 children, who had healthy childhoods and good educations. My family was not wealthy. Nowadays only the wealthy could afford to raise 16 children, with good childhoods and good education. If people now are more affluent than they were in the past, then why is it more difficult to raise children? For those who wish to have large families, it seems obvious that the last 100 years h…
In the 1800's, having children was a net asset because they were put to work as soon as they could walk. This is not so in today's society, where they are unemployable and do not contribute economically until 22 or 23. Also, my grandparents came from families with 8 or more children, and many of them died as children. This was normal for those days.
You are expanding upon my example without explaining it. My point remains: has the standard of living gone up? If people could do productive work at the age of 10, but now they have to wait till they are 25, then what metric do you use to prove that the standard of living has gone up? If you want to argue that leisure has expanded, can you prove that the expansion of leisure is entirely experienced as a positive thing? Are young men happier now that they can't find good paying work till they are in their late 20s, rather than finding such work in their late teens?
It remains true that it was easier to raise children 100 years ago than it is now. Is there a metric that shows this as a decline in the standard of living?
My point is that there is a lot that is left out of these metrics. A simplistic look at median wage and the Consumer Price Index suggests that the male median wage peaked in 1973 and family income peaked in 1999. But if you were to measure those factors that are specific to raising a family, the decline in the standard of living, for families, would show up earlier than 1999.
As to the "half the children died" argument, the steepest part of the decline in childhood death was 1850 to 1900. Of the 16 children my great grandmother gave birth to, 15 lived till at least their 18th birthday.