I read an article this morning which said "First-time buyers who do manage to secure a mortgage and a home of their own were increasingly reliant on having two high incomes". And I think this points to a lot of the reluctance I see to having kids.
To get yourself a halfway-reasonable home that you'd feel comfortable raising a kid in requires both parents to be earning*. And then, when you have a kid, you have to make a choice between one of you not working for the next three years, or on paying around £1,000/month in nursery fees (after the government tops things up a bit) to enable you to both work. The median salary in the UK for a 30-year old is about £33k, which works out as about £2,200 after tax. So you're paying nearly half of your salary to keep working, which means that things are going to get very tight.
Now imagine you're having two kids. And, sure, once they're in school (so age 4-5) your costs will drop a fair bit, but if you're working full-time then they're going to before/after school clubs, which is going to cost you £300/month (more during school holidays, when they'll need to be looked after all day). And you have to feed and entertain them. So even at that point, if you have a second child you're talking about £1,500 of your £2,200 going on your children. Which isn't going to help with the mortgage. And that's going to be enough to put a lot of people off having more than one.
Absolutely the only way to make multiple kids affordable for the general population, in a world where housing costs assume two earners, is to massively subsidise childcare. To the point where it's as cheap as, say, Germany's (£150/month/child) or France 's (£200/month on an average salary), or the Netherlands (£275/month on an average salary).
*You can rent, but I keep seeing stories about rents rising precipitously, and people being having to move on almost no notice because the landlord wants to move upmarket. Would you consider that a stable environent to raise a child?
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