Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care).
And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason.
All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen.
The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do.
Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed.
Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.
But in general better education leads to more wealth, more time spend in schools and those who have college degrees are less likely to be religious and they are less likely to have children (the price of kids is low if they can help out on the farm, very high if you have to raise them in a modern society).
I don't know a good solution to this, but I suppose the problem with fix it self on way or another.