Work from home, baby
Madeline Fry Schultz
What do parenting and working from home have in common? They both involve wearing PJ’s all day, struggling with connection problems, and a propensity to produce babies.
When the decadeslong baby slump slightly reversed in 2021, fertility rates increased for the first time in seven years. This may have been just enough to bring birthrates back to their less drastic pre-pandemic decline. But some academics suspect that, in addition to the world returning to normalcy, there’s another reason that some women are now having more children: remote work.
“The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey,” reports a recent article by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. “They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.”
So not only does remote work make caring for children easier, but it also smooths the path toward marriage, particularly for couples who may previously have debated whose career would take a hit if they moved to a new city.
These discoveries on the impact of remote work on fertility echo those of a working paper from last year, whose findings point to workplace flexibility as a solution to declining birthrates.
This is by no means a cure-all for the U.S. birthrate’s decline, which has long been below replacement level. But it does mean that one path toward incentivizing child-rearing may not be that complicated.
Katie Clarey, a mother of two from Lake Orion, Michigan, works from home part-time while her husband, Brendan, works remotely full-time. They take care of their 2-year-old and 6-month-old children during the day, with occasional help from family.
When it comes to remote work, Clarey told the Washington Examiner: “It’s hard to overstate how helpful it is. We don’t have to worry about a commute, we eat three meals together as a family every day, and it makes for a more cohesive family culture.”
Not only is their own situation beneficial to them, but so is the growing culture of remote work. “The fact that your family life is normalized is also very helpful,” Clarey said. If a baby raises her voice in the background of a Zoom call, for example, no one will bat an eye.
“Even without remote work, we were still desiring to have more children,” Clarey said, but “having the remote policies makes it tremendously easier.”