It's not a profession of choice, however people might like to sentimentalize it, but once you get into the life like that, it's extremely hard to get out of it.
There's also a historic transformation that one could almost look at that shows the moment that having children was sentimentalized, which happened around the progressive era.
Generations since have been raised to sentimentalize the past and expect little of the future, a recipe for the cultural disorientation and undirected anger that breed violence.