The Trump administration really wants Americans to have more kids. President Trump, the self-proclaimed “fertilization president,” has called for a new “baby boom.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says communities with big families should get more government funds. The on-again-off-again Trump ally Elon Musk, father of at least 14, has warned that “civilization will disappear” if we don’t get busy.
Panicked by falling fertility rates — which hit a record low of 1.6 children per woman in 2024 — the administration has floated all kinds of ideas to encourage babymaking, from launching $1,000 “Trump accounts” for newborns to soliciting outside proposals, like “motherhood medals” for moms of at least six.
Yet the administration is blind to a proven fix that is right in front of us, one that costs it nothing: hybrid work.
Simply put, working from home juices fertility. About 290,000 extra children a year have been born in the United States since the Covid pandemic fueled more work-from-home opportunities, according to a Stanford University working paper. If both parents move from full time in the office to working at home at least one day a week, they will average about 0.5 extra children, pushing toward the “replacement” level of 2.1, said the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, an author of the study. That’s a result of both opportunity (“You can’t get pregnant by email,” Bloom told me) and availability (less time commuting equals more time for parenting). Bloom called working from home “the most effective fertility-boosting policy out there.”
Other countries have seen a similar boost. Norway’s 2020 lockdown led to “a significant and persistent increase in births nine months later,” according to one study. In Italy, flexible working arrangements led both men and women to report increased desire for more children. A study in Germany concluded that the spread of high-speed internet between 2008 and 2012 increased fertility among highly educated women, because it allowed them to work from home. Both Tokyo and South Korea are exploring flexible work policies to boost fertility rates.
Yet Mr. Trump has set a terrible example on remote work, demanding on Day 1 that federal “employees return to work in person.” Dozens of major companies have followed suit, scaling back or eliminating hybrid and remote options, including Paramount, Dell and TikTok, despite extensive research showing that working from home doesn’t reduce productivity and may in fact boost it, while making employees happier.
At the same time, both the Trump administration and American companies are rolling back policies that support working parents. The administration has proposed narrowing employment protections for pregnant women and peeled back multiple anti-discrimination protections for women. Most recently, it attempted to freeze child care funding for five Democratic-led states in the wake of accusations of financial fraud in Minnesota day care centers (though a federal judge temporarily blocked the action).
Big companies, too, have cut spending on both child-care assistance and health care for dependent children, at a time when the cost of child care is increasing at twice the rate of general inflation. And companies are penalizing women who do work at home, who are far less likely to be promoted than men with comparable schedules, a McKinsey and Lean In report found.
Instead of working moms getting the support they need to have more children, they are being driven out of the work force altogether. Prime-age women’s labor force participation peaked in August 2024, powered in significant part by moms of children under five who were able to work from home. Some of those moms, in particular those with college degrees, are now leaving paid work, in what Matthew Nestler, a senior economist with the consulting firm KPMG, has dubbed “the Great Exit.” Return-to-office mandates are “one of the main causes” for women fleeing, he said.
Many prominent conservatives who fashion themselves as pronatalists concerned about declining birthrates see the solution as a return to “traditional” nuclear families, in which one parent (let’s face it, it’s the mom) stays at home. “Young children from average, healthy homes can be harmed by spending long hours in child care,” JD Vance argued in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he railed against government-subsidized day care. Having “more parents (especially women) in the work force,” he wrote, comes at the expense of “unhappier, unhealthier children.”
Some women want to stay home, and that can be great, but the vast majority of mothers want to work full or part time, according to Pew survey data. And when they do, they boost the economy. The influx of women who entered the work force after the pandemic may have helped to avert a recession that economists had been forecasting for almost two years.
Increased flexibility at work is not the sole solution to plunging fertility rates, which have been sliding for decades, a consequence of industrialization, birth control and a rise in living costs, among other issues. Governments have tried a plethora of Band-Aids, yet the problem has been resistant to easy fixes. Pronatalist policies in Poland and France, including handouts, services and tax breaks, ended up costing a stunning $1 million and $2 million, respectively, per extra child born. That doesn’t mean that increased tax credits for families, touted by some on the left and right alike, are bad policy for the United States — they might help reduce child poverty, for instance — but they are unlikely to lead to a meaningful change in birthrates.
Working from home, however, has already produced proven results. In 2021, after the pandemic shutdown sent millions home, the fertility rate actually rose slightly, a remarkable reversal after all those decades of decline. So why not go for flexible work arrangements that get us making more babies and cost nothing? A solution that pumps up the economy in the process? It’s an upside-down view, insisting that women have more children while dismantling the infrastructure that makes it possible.
Joanne Lipman is a lecturer at Yale University.
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