The girl has no internal monologue. She has to run every thought in her head by you. Most of them are pointless and incoherent, but you have to humor her. She will say "um..." just to keep warmed up for the next thing she might want to say. She requires constant attention and affirmation. She wants you to watch her do a cartwheel--identical the previous million cartwheels--and respond enthusiastically. She won't eat her vegetables. We have a rule that we eat vegetables before we eat the rest of the meal. Every meal becomes a bitter war of attrition where she fights to eat green beans as slowly as possible, hoping you will give up. (Between boy and girl, eating a meal peacefully is impossible.)

Meals--when I was single I once went three months eating a turkey sandwich every day for lunch. Your kids will not put up with this.

Getting them ready to go out is a huge effort. They have a million accessories (bottles, diapers, toys, etc.). They have no sense of urgency. You are trying to get to church on time while girl is starting a craft project.

They generate huge amounts of clutter. Markers, crayons, paper, toys, etc. Taking a hard line on toys is little help, because their school sends them home with piles of art, crafts projects, etc.

They are very rewarding. When they're sleepy and both snuggling on the couch, I hug them and think "I will never do anything better than this." My wife and I will look at the older one playing with the younger one and say: "this is the best part of life, it'll just go downhill from here." The only reason we don't have a third yet is accounting for private school tuition. At the same time, my wife and I relish going to work every Monday so we can deal with angry opposing counsel instead of picking up after the kids.

Your 7 year old would not be asking for you to endlessly watch her cartwheel and interact with her out of bordem. They would be out playing 24/7 in the local forest, come back for food and boo-boos, be back before dark and be in bed a couple of hours after dinner / night time with an 8 or 9pm sleep time and a 6am wake time.

Kids were not meant to be a lot of work, our society makes them a lot of work.

It's much safer to be a kid now than when I was growing up, but the news makes it seem like it isn't. I would let my seven year old walk to the park by herself, 1/2 a mile away, if I wasn't afraid of having the cops show up.

When I take her to the park now, I let her play on the structure about 100 yards away, within my line of sight. And still adults will come up to her and ask her where her mommy and daddy are.

My nephew is not yet four years old, so he's probably still too young to be outside playing on his own, but I fear he'll be in the same boat as your daughter in a few years, unable to do anything outside of his parents' line of sight.

I think you’re right: in the past, each kid was much less work than they are today. The difference is that you also used to have 6 of them, and used to expect that not all of them might survive to adulthood. This is clearly not acceptable approach in today’s society.

Around the 70s the workload ratchet started going up, with each decade adding more and more restrictions. Look at stranger things, today it's a bit iffy to let 12 year olds go out biking by themselves to see their friends. In the 80s you could!

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-...

And each extra kid bumps up the difficulty & time factors to some degree.