Random side thought: I'm not sure if the data we have on women over 35 giving birth are filtered for "only 1st or 2nd birth," or if they include women who are on their 7th birth and therefore have bodies that are damned tired of this process.
"Everyone pregnant at once" is a stupid, STUPID idea. But you could stagger that first set of pregnancies in 3 sets of 4-month intervals - have some women who are not pregnant at any given time, so that the obstetricians aren't all in their 8-9th month when the other women are giving birth.
And while 30 parents - 30 babies is indeed a lot, they get easier to manage if those 30 parents are living together in a dorm-like setting and the kids are grouped together as well. You lose a lot of individual parenting, maybe split into groups of 3-8 parents with the same number of kids managed, and a lot of trading kids around.
1 parent tending 1 child is tiring. 1 parent tending 2 children is exhausting. 2 parents tending 2 children is less exhausting than the 1:1 ratio. 2 parents tending 4 children is do-able. 6 parents tending 30 kids is likely exhausting but do-able! And kids over a few months old start entertaining each other - yeah, you need parents on hand to manage struggles, but you don't have the constant need to give them something to do.
You wind up with cluster families instead of anything resembling nuclear families. Oh, and you wind up with kids not prone to considering each other as romantic partners later; kids raised as siblings don't tend to turn into spouses.
2nd gen will want big families because they've never known anything else. They'll have trouble sleeping alone in a room because they've never done it. There might be one or two "odd" children who want more privacy than they had, but mostly, people are amazingly social. (There's reasons entire extended families lived in one-room houses in many places.)
You do need strict management of genetics, and that's hard to manage across multiple generations. And you quickly run into "fostering" setups - every woman is expected to bear children; not every woman needs to raise them. The problems arise four generations down the line, when someone has to explain why these two kids who were not raised together are "too closely related" to have children with each other. You need a sustainable way to describe genetic relation that's not connected with either birth or managed parenting, and you need a way for them to figure out that relation without the high-tech resources of the ship, which aren't going to last forever.
Sex relations get really strange really fast. If sex bears no connection at all to childbirth, every family structure on earth is going to be thrown out. Starting with cluster-families of women who raise children, many of which were not carried by them, and who may have no genetic connection to either womb-mother or childcare-mother ("home-mom?") isn't too difficult... but expecting to go from that, to paired-off MF couples who breed their own children sometime in the distant future... wow, that's a big jump.
They'd need a whole bunch of vocab terms describing genetic parents, host-womb parents, and the ones actually doing the child-raising. We have phrases for all these but they're bulky and awkward, because right now, it's assumed that all three are combined into the same people - who are (linguistically) presumed to be one male and one female.
David Brin's Glory Season would be good reading here. It's not the same situation but it has some comparable issues.
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"Everyone pregnant at once" is a stupid, STUPID idea. But you could stagger that first set of pregnancies in 3 sets of 4-month intervals - have some women who are not pregnant at any given time, so that the obstetricians aren't all in their 8-9th month when the other women are giving birth.
And while 30 parents - 30 babies is indeed a lot, they get easier to manage if those 30 parents are living together in a dorm-like setting and the kids are grouped together as well. You lose a lot of individual parenting, maybe split into groups of 3-8 parents with the same number of kids managed, and a lot of trading kids around.
1 parent tending 1 child is tiring. 1 parent tending 2 children is exhausting. 2 parents tending 2 children is less exhausting than the 1:1 ratio. 2 parents tending 4 children is do-able. 6 parents tending 30 kids is likely exhausting but do-able! And kids over a few months old start entertaining each other - yeah, you need parents on hand to manage struggles, but you don't have the constant need to give them something to do.
You wind up with cluster families instead of anything resembling nuclear families. Oh, and you wind up with kids not prone to considering each other as romantic partners later; kids raised as siblings don't tend to turn into spouses.
2nd gen will want big families because they've never known anything else. They'll have trouble sleeping alone in a room because they've never done it. There might be one or two "odd" children who want more privacy than they had, but mostly, people are amazingly social. (There's reasons entire extended families lived in one-room houses in many places.)
You do need strict management of genetics, and that's hard to manage across multiple generations. And you quickly run into "fostering" setups - every woman is expected to bear children; not every woman needs to raise them. The problems arise four generations down the line, when someone has to explain why these two kids who were not raised together are "too closely related" to have children with each other. You need a sustainable way to describe genetic relation that's not connected with either birth or managed parenting, and you need a way for them to figure out that relation without the high-tech resources of the ship, which aren't going to last forever.
Sex relations get really strange really fast. If sex bears no connection at all to childbirth, every family structure on earth is going to be thrown out. Starting with cluster-families of women who raise children, many of which were not carried by them, and who may have no genetic connection to either womb-mother or childcare-mother ("home-mom?") isn't too difficult... but expecting to go from that, to paired-off MF couples who breed their own children sometime in the distant future... wow, that's a big jump.
They'd need a whole bunch of vocab terms describing genetic parents, host-womb parents, and the ones actually doing the child-raising. We have phrases for all these but they're bulky and awkward, because right now, it's assumed that all three are combined into the same people - who are (linguistically) presumed to be one male and one female.
David Brin's Glory Season would be good reading here. It's not the same situation but it has some comparable issues.