They'll pay any amount for labor up to the point where the cost of the labor outweighs the additional profit for the company that the labor will induce.
Unfortunately, most of our economic assumptions are predicated on the notion that an economy that isn't growing must be stagnating. There hasn't been much work on how to sustain prosperity without growth, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy
Universal health care might help. Having a kid is gonna be a really, really bad idea financially-speaking regardless, but the risk of their having even a middlingly-bad chronic health problem and ruining your finances for life (on top of the ordinary time lost and stress caused by such misfortune) make having a kid like playing Russian roulette with your bank account, credit, and retirement.
US population growth has continued to erode toward barely expanding, and that's with immigration included. That decline is going to get worse by the decade, while simultaneously boomers continue to plunge out of the labor force over the next decade.
The US economy added between $4.5 and $5 trillion to its GDP in the last decade (an economy the size of Japan). That's while only adding ~23 million people. It's going to become increasingly difficult to replicate that growth without dramatic productivity gains. AI and robotics, automation broadly, are likely the only means to accomplish that.
Simply put, we're going to need dramatic productivity gains just to repeat the growth from the past ten years, and that growth wasn't spectacular. Want routine 3% to 4% GDP growth against sub 1% population growth? Better bring on the automation, and as much of it as possible.