Schadrach
The folks who have large numbers of kids typically start handing off childcare duties to the older ones as soon as they're physically capable of doing those tasks. Especially the girls - usually these sorts of families don't want boys doing child care unless there are no girls, but the boys start getting used for labor around the same age.
tell that to any woman in the use asking to be sterilized, crazy the hoops you have to jump through
That's entirely about finding the right doctor. I've known men who were refused a vasectomy because "you'll want kids later and it isn't always reversible" and were asked to get a consent form signed by their wife. Both are things that are common "hoops" women go through when trying to get a conservative doctor to do a hysterectomy or tubal ligation.
My wife actually brought me with her to the doctor's appointment where she asked for her hysterectomy "just in case" and the doctor asked why she brought me with her and I kind of sheepishly answered "moral support." She had seen every other gyno in the area and had problems with all of them, ranging from ignoring her issues to doing a uterine biopsy using a kevorkian punch (look it up, it's designed to be inserted, and then essentially a metal claw on the business end gouges out a piece of tissue to sample) with no pain relief of any kind on the grounds that "it's less painful than childbirth". Most of them were women (including the one that did the uterine biopsy), the one who did her hysterectomy was one of the only men.
There is no profit generation in the industry.
That's because we're in relatively early R&D and are trying to speedrun things in a way we generally don't with most tech. To compare to tech you understand and are familiar with, where we're at currently would be equivalent to like the internet in the late 80s/early 90s, except we've all seen how that went and everyone wants to be the Amazon, Microsoft or Google of the AI market when it moves from high R&D and little to no profit to becoming a mainstream part of everyday life.
That transition point will probably be when bipedal robots that can do most tasks as well as a human while running a local model get cheap enough to be sold as industrial equipment. It's why Asian labs (especially Chinese ones) keep showing off bipedal robots doing tasks that require either significant agility or fine motor skills involving predicting where body parts are (like doing needlepoint without being able to see it's hands or doing dance routines).
Or they owned a farm, and 7 or 8 of those kids are already doing significant amounts of farm labor to earn their food. The economics of having tons of kids is radically different when they go from being a cost to a profit in 8ish years instead of from a cost to not a budget item in hopefully 22 if you're lucky.
The US school calendar was based on the realities of this. So was the election schedule, voting on a Tuesday aligns neatly with the schedules of farmers bringing goods to the nearest town for market.