As the human developed into larger societal structures and greater urbanization, it devised increasingly creative and complex way to justify minimizing spending time with its procreations. Migrations for example. You could leave the house and be gone, for years and years and years maybe even with your partner!, without anyone shrieking their lungs out because they want some random nonsense or another. Or alternatively, you could make them go away, preferably on long sea voyages or exploration of new lands, from which they might never want to come back. If you were lucky, they performed various tasks of great bravery and were offered crown lands by the monarch, preferably somewhere far faraway from you. If not, you sent them to spend long stretches of time with someone their own age group and interests, so they may bother each other instead. And that is how the institution of marriage came to be.
Marriage however, was not sufficient. For not everyone is ready, or meant to be, for the institution. Then a creative head who's in somewhere really good came with a stroke of genius. I may have messed up the timeline and the order of events, so apologies for that. What if you paid a minimal amount of grains or currency to an institution that would take all the spawn you could offer once they reach a certain age? The contribution you would have to make would be far less than what you would otherwise have to part physically, and in terms of your mental and emotional spent. And that is how monasteries, churches, abbeys, hermitages, etcetera came to me, eventually leading to the modern religion.
Religion and marriage by themselves were not sufficient. There are only so many yapping yodelers that can fit into a place of worship after all. As the population grew, all existing locations were full of people's children, and now parents were forced to reckon with the consequences of their extracurricular entertainment acts. There were too many people, and too few buildings. This is another of those moments of clarity and genius. Someone decided, realized rather, perhaps discovered, that there could be a way to increase the places where one can keep the young 'uns away from their parents, as far as possible, while not letting the numbers climb exponentially. The discovery -- or was it invention rather? -- of war thus had two purposes: to keep the population under check, and expand the lands to house the population.
War, however, was not the ideal solution. For it could come into your borders and into your houses. And a victory condition was possible about fifty percent of the time, which you would think wouldn't be too bad because your people just conquered a large swathe of land but whaddya know there's more people in there who want to get away from their own children. Besides, it creates all sorts of problems that can eventually amount to more trouble than what you started with in the first place.
And therefore the human industrialized. At first, it was a way to escape the home. Then, it became a way to get rid of your children to the factory but it was not considered a good idea for various reasons. Then it was back to going to the factory to escape the home, but one soon realized that the work was close to being as bad as staying with one's near and dear loved ones. And thus began the post-industrialization phase of human society. One can now go to offices to pretend to work, send one's kids to be taken care by other people, and no one's none the wiser. By maintaining a limited contact with one's children, the human has learned to appreciate them more while preserving their own sanity. Things were not perfect, but they were as good as it was going to get.
And then this happened, upending everything.
You think this is a joke and I'm trying to be funny. Just ask your co-workers with children.
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