As to lower birthrates, I think it's all of the things mentioned, but it's also that children changed from being an economic asset into being an enormous economic drain. The way we believe we should or are taught to raise them nowadays also necessitates an equally enormous investment of time and energy.
Some people just aren't willing to make the sacrifices required. They prefer to spend their money on themselves. I'm not saying they're necessarily more selfish innately than people of prior generations: it's just that they now have options.
In terms of Southern European countries, this is not a new phenomenon. In my mother's family and many others couples even in the thirties, before artificial birth control, were limiting the size of their families. My father's family, with eleven births, was an anomaly, and my paternal grandfather suffered a lot of criticism for it. After the war, the rule was already one child. My mother was soundly taken to task by her family members for having a second child. The considerations were not just economic either. It was also a feeling that you wanted to do so much for them that you just didn't have the resources of any kind to do it for a lot of children.
In individual cases it's also a function of temperament, and whether both partners want to pursue careers. Given the stresses of raising children in the modern world, and my own personality, I absolutely didn't want more than two or three children. There was also no way that I could see managing a large family with a career of my own: I already made a lot of sacrifices in that regard even with just two.
To circle back to the main topic, the fascists were aware of the problem in the thirties in at least some areas of the country, and were offering incentives to families to have more children.
Very enlightening comment, Angela. As you say, this is not a sudden challenge that appeared out of nowhere, it's been slowly building more and more until it reached a really worrisome level in some countries (and probably many more are to come in the near future). I also believe that you nailed it when you mentioned that, apart from their being an economic drain, we "believe or were taught" to raise children in a certain way that honestly I think sometimes veers on obsessive perfectionism.
Parents are expected to be and do too much for their children, whereas I know numerous stories from older people who tell me how they, after some age, grew up virtually "on their own" with their parents just supervising them and helping here and there. And, simultaneously, people - including parents - expect way too much from their children nowadays, almost as if they are training them for extreme competition of the modern capitalist world since they. In some way, I also think that the consumerism of the present world has also meant an increasing amount of stress and guilt for the parents, for they are expected to or themselves think that to be good parents they
need to give their children the best comforts they can afford. And of course this sacrifice will more often become too much for some people than in the past, when - at least here where I live - you were regarded as a good parent if you just managed to give enough food, clothes, school and a good bed to your children, period.
What's worse, as I have noticed with some of my younger married relatives, is that they were told to give their children
everything and
24/7 limitless attention, but at the same time they don't have enough time and resources themselves, and unlike previous generations they have a much smaller and loser social network (cousins, friends, neighbors etc.) that in the past usually were virtually co-participants in the upbringing of a children.
I think all these things have created currently a pretty toxic family environment full of stress, anxiety, guilt, unrealistic ambitions and expectations that they can never meet even for 1 children, let alone for 2 or 3 (for those parents aren't just parents, they are also professionals, husbands and wives, and other social roles, and of course they at some point will be fed up with the idea that they have to make
everything they can to guarantee the success of their kids, lest they become future losers in an increasingly competitive society).
