[wizee]

People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.

[watwut]

All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Who said anything about the idle lifestyle?

[mandmandam]

In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').

Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.

[quickthrowman]

No they didn’t, read some history. ‘Cottage industry’ and ‘child labor’ are good search terms to use.

[dcow]

Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.