> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?

This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.

Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.

If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.

I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.

At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.

This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.

(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").

I think the issue is that you pretty much can't pay enough.

I was reflecting, since becoming a parent, that there are basically two lenses with which to view the economics of parenting. You can children in terms of their cost and benefits in monetary terms, where money is the end and children are the means to that. Or you can view money as the means to support and provide for children, with raising them as the ultimate end goal. And people with the former worldview will most likely never have children, and if they do probably will not make good parents. Parenting is a 24/7 commitment for at least 18 years. It fundamentally changes the course of your life. And children also need to believe that they are the most important thing in their parents' lives, which is hard to do, by definition, when the most important thing is money.

I sit here trying to get some rest after having 5 days of rotating sick kids. When the baby was sick, he would wake up literally every hour; last night was the first in 5 days where I had any sleep stretch longer than an hour. (This also pales in comparison with the newborn phase, which is like this but lasts for about 4 months.) How much would you have to get paid to go without sleep for months on end? I was at a party a few months ago where someone asked "How many of you have caught vomit in your hands?" Every single parent raised their hand while every single non-parent looked on disgusted. How much would you have to get paid to catch vomit? I've been reliably sick about twice a week every winter for the last 7 years. How much would you pay to let a little germ-factory infect you all the time? (When governments have done medical experiments on this basis, it's been called abusive.)

When you have a realistic picture of what parenting actually entails, it starts to look a lot more like the economics of pricelessness [1]. There is usually no price at which people will be willing to compromise everything you give up by being a parent (usually things like liberty, experiences, security, peace) for parenthood if you don't want it. And conversely, there is usually no price at which people will give up the experience of parenthood for more money, if that's what they really want.

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2014/08/12/the-economics-of-priceless...

A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.