I don't think we should want women to be anything in particular. Saying they shouldn't be stay at home mums is wrong. And society has caught up in the sense that house prices are driven up by bids from two-person incomes.
not all women—my wife, for example—agree with this sentiment.
we bought a house and got married, but my income alone is not enough to pay our mortgage, bills, food, etc.
we want to have children as soon as possible, but unfortunately we don't know when that will be, purely due to financial constraints.
in the meantime, my wife must work to supplement our income to keep us afloat, and to accumulate some savings for having children later on.
I'm a full-time-employed programmer for our local school district. in an ideal world, my salary alone would be enough to support raising a family. but, today, this is not the case.
fortunately, we may have a solution that could work for us, as it's presently working for a close friend: have the wife run a small, in-home daycare for a few other children, in addition to taking care of our own.
it's a less-than-ideal solution—we'd love to have the mother of our children spend her full time and attention on just our own kids—but that's not really feasible in today's society, unless you are lucky to have generational wealth or some such.
and, of course, this is all from the perspective of someone who doesn't have any sort of temporal limit on my ability to procreate—I can only try my best to understand how my wife feels, living through her prime fertility years anxiously waiting for the Right Time To Birth Children, purely based on financial constraints.
but anyway, believe it or not, there are women out there who would love to do nothing else but raise children and take care of the family home, while the husband provides income through work. it's really unfortunate that we've chosen, as a society, to sideline the desires that these women have for their lives, which were the unquestioned societal norm only a few short generations ago.
If you're a resident of a developed country in the year 2023, I guarantee you that the vast majority of your ancestors were poorer when they had their children than you will be if you have children now.
Make childcare not a choice between living in poverty and not, and people will have children again. Many of my generation including myself can't afford children despite us wanting to.
The worst problem is obviously housing costs and cost of living in general, coupled with wage stagnation. We don't want women to be stay-at-home mothers for good reasons, but society as it is hasn't caught up with that - not to mention it's financially impossible. Our parents generally could afford that, as even simple factory jobs paid enough for a good home (that they owned and could build equity for themselves by mortgage, no less) and the mother to stay at home to actually raise the children.
The US also has the problems of healthcare cost and a rise of anti-abortion laws that place the life of a fetus before the life of the mother, I can completely understand anyone not wishing to risk death from childbirth.