It's clear that, on so many levels, the gradual deferral of child-bearing to the 30s (even 40s!) has been incredibly costly and destructive to society.
We need to figure out a way to reconcile having children starting in the late teens and ending in the mid-20s (which is by far the safest, cheapest, and easiest time to do it) with the modern economy (which prioritizes slavishly focusing on school/work until your fertility has mostly dried up and you're at massively increased risk of passing on genetic abnormalities).
One strategy could be to have child-rearing skip a generation, with grandparents (in their 30s/40s) doing most of the work while the parents (in their teens/20s) go to school and start their career.
I think there is also an increasing sense that young people should enjoy life and freedom. Travel, go on adventures etc. I certainly had that attitude in my 20s, and didn't want to be tied down. Seems like it's a relatively recent thing. Older generations had a pretty straight path from school to work to family + kids.
For a while I've been thinking about moving back in/near my parents so that if/when I decide to start a family, they can be around to help out so as dampen the career stunting effects of having children. I think this would especially be useful to my then wife, but of course such things sound great on paper but are much more difficult to execute in reality.
Medical outcomes rapidly become much worse and more expensive for both mother and child as mothers age, as well as precipitously falling birth rates partially attributable to the increased difficulty of having marginal children as one gets older.
I made a comment elsewhere in the thread trying to quantify the way outcomes change with the mother's age [1]. Using the data referenced in that comment, it looks like outcomes are quite stable for the entirety of a woman's 20s and still decent into her early 30s. The real change seems to occur in the early-mid 30s.
In contrast, your parent comment prioritizes women having children at age 20-25. Looking at the data I just referenced, this seems unnecessarily aggressive from a medical standpoint -- do you have a different measure of maternal outcomes in mind? (And from a non-medical standpoint, I'm skeptical that late teens/early 20s are the best time for modern humans to choose the parent of their child.)
We need to figure out a way to reconcile having children starting in the late teens and ending in the mid-20s (which is by far the safest, cheapest, and easiest time to do it) with the modern economy (which prioritizes slavishly focusing on school/work until your fertility has mostly dried up and you're at massively increased risk of passing on genetic abnormalities).
One strategy could be to have child-rearing skip a generation, with grandparents (in their 30s/40s) doing most of the work while the parents (in their teens/20s) go to school and start their career.