His / her point is that de facto the industry takes a point of view biased on an economical perspective towards the situation. (Your answer ironically does reflect this as well). The benefit of having children is to have a family and to, in a more biological sense, have offspring which ensures your dna remains within the society. Having a family takes time and enforcing a young parent (especially a person with such a background) to start working in a relative short amount of time is very taxing on their personal life. A better possible solution would be to let the young parent have the ability to work home for a couple days, rather than just giving the option to be fired.

Let me brag a little bit.

Myself and my fiancee don't have children yet. However, you may kinda want us in society's gene pool. After all, I've got a damned resilient immune system, she's wonderfully empathetic, and we're both ferociously clever and hardworking individuals who valued our educations and actually want to contribute to society. Hell, we're even proud of paying our taxes, we both volunteer for things in our spare time, and we consider time spent on civic or community affairs to be well-spent.

I'd be fine paying the "opportunity cost" myself, but you see, I'm not the one with the uterus. Really, if we could get by and support a kid on one income per couple, we could easily just make some sacrifices of Nice Things, but we can't. Yes, we actually are stuck between living as fiscally responsible adults in the Dual Income No Kids class, and the precarity of the so-called "middle class" nowadays, in which one layoff or unexpected medical emergency can throw the whole family into poverty.

It's become: housing, children (with the entailed college funds, housing cost of good public schools, etc.), responsible preparation for a rainy day -- pick any two.

Elizabeth Warren was lecturing people about this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GHg3GAeQ1Y