Research Suggests People Who Work From Home Are Having More Babies

"Flexibility at work has the power to drive fertility decisions," according to researchers running a survey in the U.S. and 38 other countries.

Pronatalists push all manner of big-government schemes aimed at raising fertility rates. But could a more modest—and more market-oriented—policy prove better at boosting births? Research suggests that more remote work leads to larger families.

People who worked from home at least one day per week "had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not" work from home, according to the August 2025 working paper, "Work from Home and Fertility." A team of researchers from Stanford University, Princeton University, and international institutes surveyed working arrangements, recent births, and future fertility intentions in 39 countries, including the United States, finding that women who worked from home at least once a week had an average of 0.039 more children than nonteleworking peers did since 2021.

"A similar result holds for American men," they found, though the association was not statistically significant for men in the multicountry sample. But in both the U.S. and other countries, male fertility was positively correlated with a spouse or partner's work-from-home status. And "when both partners [work from home] at least one day per week….total lifetime fertility
is greater by 0.2 children" in the global sample, compared with couples where neither partner works from home.

Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that "it's also plausible that parents with young children at home may select" work-from-home arrangements more often.

Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.

In the United States, average total planned fertility—a combination of the number of children already born or gestating and how many future children are desired—went from 2.26 to 2.43 for women and 2.01 to 2.36 for men who personally worked from home at least one day per week, and 2.43 for women and 2.52 for men when both they and their partner did. In the multicountry sample, the average total planned fertility increased from 1.9 for women and 1.86 for men when neither partner worked from home to 2.27 and 2.46, respectively, when both partners did.

The coronavirus pandemic provided a natural test of whether working from home could lead to more births. In 2021, the U.S. fertility rate rose 1 percent, following a near-steady decline since the late 2000s and contradicting crisis-era birth trends. The U.S. fertility rate dropped steeply in 2020; it's hard to say whether the 2021 bump was due to working from home (or something else about pandemic arrangements) or was a natural rebound. But the fact that the bump was largest among college-educated women, who are more likely to have jobs that would have allowed working from home during the pandemic, lends credence to the theory that remote work played a role.

A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw "a significant and persistent" 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These "fertility increases were concentrated among women in 'greedy jobs' with lower flexibility prior to lockdown," according to the paper. "The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism," rather than increased time due to job loss.

Researchers Bernt Bratsberg and Selma Walther say this is "evidence that [workplace] flexibility directly impacts fertility."

Post-COVID fertility rates continue to decline globally, despite cash incentives, mandatory maternity leave policies, and state-subsidized child care. "Until now, discussion of declining fertility has focused on policies such as maternity leave and childcare provision," note Bratsberg and Walther. "Flexibility at work," they say, "has the power to drive fertility decisions."

This aligns with previous research suggesting that typical
government enticements to boost birth rates fail because decisions about family size are complex, personal, and extend beyond purely financial factors. It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.

Comments

[Vernon Depner]

Libertarian Reason advocating more no-show jobs for federal employees. *sigh*

[Mickey Rat]

In the realm of things Reason no longer reports on. US District court strikes down California laws preventing parents from being informed about their children's mental health in public schools:

"Democrat policies proudly championed in California by Gov. Gavin Newsom have for years kept parents in the dark about their children's mental health and personal circumstances — particularly about whether their kids are masquerading as members of the opposite sex at school and undergoing a so-called "social transition" with the help of school staff.

U.S. District Court Judge Roger Benitez delivered Democrat officials and other gender ideologues a big upset on Monday, ruling in favor of the plaintiffs and against the grooming regime.

Benitez noted at the outset of his 52-page ruling that long before the advent of compulsory education in the U.S., "parents have carried out their rights and responsibility to direct the general and medical care and religious upbringing of their child.""

According to Benitez, "the parental exclusion policies create a trifecta of harm." For starters,

'they harm the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. They harm the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make healthcare decisions for their children, and by substantially burdening many parents’ First Amendment right to train their children in their sincerely held religious beliefs. And finally, they harm teachers who are compelled to violate the [sic] sincerely held beliefs and the parent’s rights by forcing them to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students.'

Benitez barred California Attorney General Rob Bonta, California Superintendent Tony Thurmond, and members of the California Board of Education from implementing or enforcing laws or policies in such a manner as to permit or require any employee in the state education system to:

-mislead the parent or guardian of a minor student "about their child's gender presentation at school" by way of direct lies, denial of access to educational records, or "using a different set of preferred pronouns/names when speaking with the parents than is being used at school";
- "use a name or pronoun to refer to that child that do not match the child's legal name and natal pronouns, where a child’s parent or legal guardian has communicated their objection to such use"; and
- use incorrect pronouns or a false name in reference to a student "while concealing that social gender transition from the child’s parents."
The judge also ordered state education officials to prominently feature the following statement in their LGBT "cultural competency" training materials:

'Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.'"

https://www.theblaze.com/news/incredible-victory-federal-judge-prohibits-trans-grooming-efforts-in-california-schools?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dlvr.it_fb_theblaze&tpcc=social_fb-post

[mad.casual]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So you're telling me that the more women *voluntarily* disengage from the workplace, the more they *voluntarily* have kids?

Why, by that logic, lying to women and telling them to quit having kids and going and getting a job as the ticket to some sort of happiness or self-fulfillment, especially under the banner of feminism would seem almost diabolically evil. Heralding abortion, declining birth rates, sex work as some sort of enlightened, post-gender, transcendentalism wouldn't just be some Idiocracy-style "The smart people didn't anticipate stupid people outbreeding them." parody, but a grotesque progrom to take advantage of low-IQ women and pit them against men for your own manipulations.