Did medieval peasants have more children on average than royalty? Or is this a modern phenomenon?
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It’s more about the nature of the society we live in. For most of human history most people spent most of their money on food. We lived in largely agrarian societies where technology was primitive and not very productive, and the only way to produce a larger output of food and therefore earn more was through having more people. Therefore having more kids was advantageous, especially when you add in the fact that infant and child mortality rates were very high, so if you had say 6 children, only 3 or 4 would even make it to adulthood, which isn’t the case in modern society. In those societies there wasn’t even much of a concept of “childhood”, as it exists in a modern industrial society, children were put to work pretty much as soon as they were able.
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