I have not yet found a single planned 3rd child among my colleagues and associates in situations where both husband and wife work full time (without live in help, or at least someone who comes to the house full time to watch the kids before and even a little after the parents come home). Not saying it won't happen that I will eventually find one, but I find it to be the single biggest predictor of having more than 2 kids.

Don’t forget grandparents. That’s how my wife and I had three while both working as corporate lawyers. This is quite common among people I know.

I’ve been curious how Amy Coney Barret and her husband pulled it off. She definitely has it all, staggering.

She lives in a Catholic faith community in South Bend. There’s lots of kids of all ages and so always people around to babysit, etc. It’s like my dad described his village in Bangladesh. Nobody takes care of their kid all the time like in America. (The women have to go into the rice fields during the day too.) The kids get passed around.

That's fascinating. I'm starting to awaken to the fact that America has a bunch of expensive solutions to problems and create these impressions that there is no other practical way. People figure out stuff all the time but somehow those means never become communicated to become mainstream or even purported as an alternative. It's interesting to put ideas to the "but does it scale" test. I think that idea of individual parents fully monitoring their kids maybe doesn't scale when the kids begin to outnumber the parents. Interesting stuff to ponder.