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Notes -
You can look at it that way, but I don't think it gets to the point. Parenting children is a lot of non-delegable work that takes up time. It's less that you could be doing other things in that time and those other things have become more valuable (which is "opportunity cost") than that the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased. That's an issue even if the only thing you could do with the time was no more valuable than it was a century ago.
I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.
Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.
That time counts!
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