Quote From PracticalMouse:
I got pregnant about 10 months into my funded PhD. It worked out great - because my husband took on a massive amount of childcare after my maternity leave finished to give me the space to complete. I submitted on time, and now don't have to worry about being an 'old' mother and can look for jobs without thinking about when to get pregnant. However I do think if you want a career in academia, more than one is madness. I literally do not know a single woman with more than one child who has been able to make that work (unless her husband is a stay-at-home full-time dad).
Make sure before you embark on this route that your husband is totally committed too...you will need his support.
I worked with a woman with 2 kids who said she was essentially earning nothing because her entire wage was being eaten up in childcare.
I couldn't understand why they considered that money as coming from her salary and not jointly split between her and her husband.
In a surprising number of families, both the "partners" consider their earnings to be their own. Each to their own I suppose but in my house everything both of us earns goes into a single pot.
Therefore, when two amounts of childcare need to be paid for it is not my wife who is essentially paying "her whole salary" to pay for all this - the childcare is coming from the joint pot.
This is important because many women stop working because they think it isn't financially worth it. But you need to factor in whether a 3 to 5 year gap in your CV is going to be a problem. A continuous CV, in my opinion, has a financial value to it in itself.
Of course, childcare is expensive but it doesn't last forever. Once the kids are in school it largely stops.
Obviously some women (and some men too actually) prefer to stay at home for a few years looking after the kids, in which case that is fine.