I think it's just about finding out where you like making a difference. Try out different stuff. I realized I didn't enjoy volunteering because I found it to be too slow, and also I don't like donating blood. So instead I donate to charities (e.g. https://www.againstmalaria.com/) where a little money really goes a long way.
That's the neat part: we often don't know how/whether these things can be applied to programming, Econ, or other fields of study. But all of a sudden someone might find a use case for it.
I think the answer to a lot of this is nuanced, e.g. education including uni is free, except kindergarten and daycare for some weird reason. But the price of those two depends on your income, so if you're a single parent you get more help. As far as I can remember, daycare was equivalent to 800 USD/month.
I imagine there's a lot of help to get if you need it, but I don't know tbh.
There's free health checks during and after pregnancy, and free help (to some extent) if you want to but can't get pregnant.
You get money from the state until your kid turns 18, and if they move out when they go to high school/uni the kid also get around 1000 USD/month in subsidies, that don't have to be paid back after.
Depending on your career, there's a lot of understanding for wfh, more time off, you have days off if kid is sick, etc. My employers we're very understanding.
Then there's around 1 year of parental leave - most allocated for the mom ofc. I think now the rules are 14 weeks for the father.
And yes, Copenhagen is expensive af. I was lucky to get andelsbolig, but otherwise I think it's common to pay 50% of your salary for renting an apartment.
governments around the world suck, but that doesn't fully capture why people don't have kids:
we're well off and heavily helped with kids-related stuff here in Denmark where we also don't get many children. I read somewhere else a lot of the explanation is instead that people just don't value having kids add much as they did generations ago.
You should have been born in Denmark haha. At Christmastime we eat risengrød and ris a la mande, both are absolutely delicious