Every stage of pregnancy, from conception to morning sickness to well checks, becomes easier when you and your spouse aren’t both at your respective offices full-time. So, statistically, my workplace wasn’t the only one with some late-notice pregnancy announcements toward the end of 2020.
When white-collar workers were all still Zooming (or, écrasez l’infâme, Microsoft Teams-ing), it was much easier for an expectant mom to hide pregnancy symptoms until much later than would have been noticed in an office environment. Some women were even able to not just conceal a pandemic-era pregnancy but give birth to a secret COVID baby without their colleagues being any the wiser. Take a few days off, make sure you’re on mute during the next check-in, and before you know it, baby will be old enough to help code those TPS reports.
America’s abrupt introduction to widespread remote work created a more pro-natal and parent-friendly work environment. Employees were no longer expected to, and often couldn’t, leave their identity as a parent at the door. Conference calls with Paw Patrol softly piping through the background became commonplace. Commutes became less onerous. Jobs that once were thought to require 40 hours a week in person turned out not to—though whether they can sustainably subsist on zero hours a week in person remains to be seen.
For this new world didn’t eliminate tradeoffs. It just shifted some of their burden, from parents to employers, supervisors, and colleagues. A more pro-family nation should be willing to accept some of that reallocation of burden. The ongoing push to get more workers back into offices on a regular basis threatens some of the newfound flexibility and freedom from which families benefited during the pandemic’s aftermath.
Navigating a more pro-family workplace and the incremental costs it adds to firms should take more of our attention than a reflexive return-to-work push. America’s remote-work baptism-by-fire can serve to illustrate our blind spots in how we treat parenthood and fertility—or it can be a blip before we return to business-as-usual.
Escaping the Parent Trap
America’s annual fertility rate—the number of births per every 1,000 women of childbearing age—has fallen 22% since 2007, the year the most babies were born in American history. That is largely driven by two factors: fewer women having children outside of marriage, and fewer Americans getting married in the first place.
The fertility rate among married women, for example, fell by about 9% since 2007, to 84.2 births per 1,000 married women of childbearing age (defined as age 15 to 44) in 2022. Among unmarried women over that same timeframe, birth rates plunged 28%, to 37.2 per 1,000 single women in the same age bracket. For perspective, that level of unmarried births is roughly what the birth rate for unmarried women was in 1988 (when it was at 38.5 births per 1,000 unmarried women, and rising).
The biggest story underlying the recent fertility plunge has been the falling prevalence of single motherhood—something that anyone who is concerned about birth rates as more than just numbers on a spreadsheet should celebrate. The problem, from a macro perspective, is that women who are avoiding single parenthood are not choosing to get married and have kids later in life. Rates of singlehood and childlessness are rising.
And there’s plenty of global evidence to suggest that a straightforward prescription of generous social spending or economic growth won’t get you out of the tailspin. This fertility decline took hold even as the economy was strengthening through the pre-COVID Trump years; as researchers have pointed out, the late 2010s was among the best times for low- and medium-wage workers in the last half-century. The logic is straightforward: As the economy improves and wages rise, the opportunity cost of having kids rises as well.
Then came the annus horribilis. Birth rates dropped in 2020, yes—but some of that was shockingly mechanical. The biggest source of fertility decline in the Year of COVID was not native-born women choosing to have fewer kids but a relative paucity of foreign-born women, kept from entering the country as a result of pandemic restrictions. Prior to the pandemic, 22% of babies born in the U.S. had foreign-born mothers. When the lockdown restrictions went into place, non-native fertility plunged. U.S.-born women, on the other hand, had essentially just as many babies in 2020 as the year before and even higher fertility than would have been expected pre-pandemic.
The pandemic’s impact on birth rates could have been more severe if it hadn’t been for the new possibilities of the remote-work world, a working paper from a trio of researchers suggests. They found the most pronounced effect of the 2021 baby bump was on young mothers, who were able to launch a career and a family sooner than they might have otherwise. There was another pronounced bump for women in their early 30s with a college degree, at a stage in life to take advantage of COVID-era flexibility.
The benefits of COVID-era policies for college-educated married women is visible to the naked eye. Across a backdrop of ongoing fertility decline, the sheer number of births among this demographic jumped by about 50,000, while working-class women saw a continued slide. (These numbers do not include California, which inexcusably does not report parent’s marital status on birth certificates.)

To contextualize this a little more, 2019 saw 33.5 births per 1,000 college-educated women in their childbearing prime. In 2021, it was 35.6, and it ticked up slightly again in 2022 to 35.7. A 6.5% increase over four years may not seem like a big deal. But against a backdrop of declining fertility worldwide, and the fact that 45% of women age 25 to 44 have a bachelor’s degree or more, even marginal improvements are a notable development indeed.
The annual American Community Survey allows us to see what professions benefited most. Among working married women, those in professions that were most conducive to remote work tended to see higher relative growth in having had a baby. Married women who work as real estate brokers saw their self-reported fertility increase 30% compared to the year prior to the pandemic. (And 2021 was also a boom year for real estate sales, suggesting that some of those commissions went towards sprucing up the nursery.) Other professions that easily made the transition to remote work, such as accountants and auditors, saw double-digit relative growth in having had a child over that time frame.
Married women who work in professions that require in-person attendance, on the other hand—teachers, nurses, child care workers, physical therapists, and sales reps—saw lower rates of fertility in the post-COVID era than prior to the pandemic.

There were other major factors changing for households in the pandemic’s wake: the lockdowns and their aftermath, large-scale federal stimulus spending, the great housing reshuffle as people escaped blue cities for the Sun Belt. But the fact that the fertility bump was highest among the subgroups most likely to benefit from more flex work or work-from-home opportunities is useful information for proponents of pro-family policymaking.
The hours not spent commuting; the feasibility of doing conference calls while warming up a bottle or even (shh!) at the playground; more options to juggle child care, like time-shifting periods of productivity to after bedtime. Opening the door to less traditional work-life arrangements make the tensions between family and career less severe—and parents did what comes naturally.
Post-Office?
Remote work has settled into something of a new normal after the pandemic, neither delivering the desk-less utopia of its biggest boosters nor disappearing the way its detractors hoped it might. Prior to the pandemic, just 5.7% of workers worked remotely; in 2023, about 10% of workers reported working remotely full-time, with nearly that many reporting some type of hybrid work situation.
That isn’t evenly distributed across the population. Barring a paradigm shift in robotics, it remains exceptionally difficult to bus tables, operate a pile driver, change bedpans, or install a new light fixture while sitting at home. The share of workers with a college degree reporting some kind of remote or flex work situation is nearly five times that of workers with a high school degree or less.
White-collar workers tell pollsters they value remote work, and there are some benefits to their employers: higher employee satisfaction, better retention, lower overhead costs.
Yet there are drawbacks as well. The spontaneous conversations that generate innovation or casual check-ins that keep small problems from flaring into big ones are difficult to replicate in even the most connected virtual workplace. As Edward Glaeser, the dean of urban economics, posited in 2022, “the dynamic losses from working from home will only appear over time, just like the losses that have already come from remote schooling.” No one can accuse a company like Amazon or J.P. Morgan Chase of not quantifying employee productivity to the nth degree, suggesting they have data that proves their recent reintroduction of full-time in-person work pencils out to higher returns even after accounting for the loud grumbles they have had to put up with.
Maintaining a healthy office culture or spirit of connectedness in an all or mostly virtual environment is a challenge. The staff of Dunder Mifflin would have all quit one season into The Office if they didn’t have each other to commiserate with in person. And the digital tools intended to solve this problem often create groupthink instead. Just ask the management of the New York Times what purpose their Slack channels served during various COVID-era revolts. There are other spillovers to consider as well. At least part of the rise in disorder and crime in America’s urban spaces is due to fewer bodies in train cars, coffee shops, and urban plazas.
And because work-from-home’s beneficiaries tend to be upwardly mobile, at more risk of carpal tunnel than calluses, it’s no surprise remote work has a bit of an image problem. The twin heads of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have leveled scorn at federal employees’ continued reliance on remote work (according to the Office of Management and Budget, telework-eligible federal workers spent about 60% of their time in person, with another 10% working remote full-time).
Under these circumstances, it’s possible generous remote work ends up looking something like the generous paid leave programs Silicon Valley long touted and then quietly rolled back. Netflix was able to offer a year of paid leave after having a baby when it was a growth company because it was eating Hollywood’s lunch. Now that it’s mature, with shareholders to report to, the benefits have been scaled back to something closer to the industry standard. Especially as previously tight labor markets continue to normalize, the ability to work remotely may become something employees on the parent track increasingly opt into, like a fringe benefit some employees choose in lieu of a higher salary.
Under that scenario, it’s not difficult to imagine the usual suspects on the left raising Cain about a purported “remote work penalty,” calling for pay equity or anti-discrimination laws against discrepancies in pay for remote or hybrid workers. Lawmakers in some countries, like the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, have proactively proposed instituting a “right” to remote work, in which employers would be required to grant an employee’s request for flexible work unless it poses an undue hardship.
In America’s litigious civil rights regime, piling more purported rights on top of others seems likely to create more mischief than babies. More level-headed would be to codify remote or hybrid work as a fringe benefit like any other. To bite the bullet, proponents should admit that working remotely may lead to a lower earnings trajectory or fewer promotions; if workers are choosing this as an acceptable trade-off to start or spend time with their family, that’s a trade-off we should accept as worth it.
Understanding hybrid or remote work as a valuable tool some workers will rightly prize in lieu of higher pay, rather than as a guaranteed entitlement, will preserve some flexibility without trying to shoehorn American businesses into adopting a quasi-COVID footing for the long term.
Parent-Friendly Labor Practices
The technological frontier jumped abruptly outward during COVID. That gave more parents, moms in particular, an expanded choice set. If pregnancy in 2019 meant asking your boss for time off for increasingly frequent OB appointments, finding 40 hours a week of child care perfectly situated between work and home, and scraping enough parental leave to make sure you weren’t leaving your colleagues in the lurch, a post-2020 world gives many parents much wider latitude in divvying up work and parenthood.
In some respects, it’s a fairly straightforward story, one that illustrates that taking stated “preferences” about work and fertility remains a delicate operation. How many of the pandemic moms could have imagined benefitting from the remote work boom in 2019? How many more might be open to changing their calculus if future productivity-enhancing developments make it easier to balance work and home?
Building a pro-family society goes beyond the types of fiscal policies many on the right (such as myself) like to espouse. For a college-educated, white-collar married woman, a $2,000 Child Tax Credit, or even a $5,000 Child Tax Credit, would be very unlikely to shift her choices in the same way being able to work from home did. Money can make a difference, but a fully pro-family culture has to take the pain points facing parents and would-be parents seriously. Long commutes, dangerous public spaces, headache-inducing health-care bureaucracies—our policy choices can be indifferent to the burdens facing parents, or they can prioritize tackling them. Remote work kills at least a couple of birds with one stone.
For parents who aren’t lucky enough to work “laptop jobs,” policymakers could think of other ways to hem in some of the excesses of the current labor market to make the balance a little more parent-friendly. Proposals to restrict or ban the practice of “just-in-time scheduling,” in which workers receive their schedule a day or two in advance, certainly wouldn’t make small business owners happy, but would be a huge step forward in giving working-class parents a little more predictability. One American Economic Review paper estimated workers, particularly women, were willing to see their wages decline by up to 20% in exchange for a more stable work schedule.
Some European firms have experimented with “off-the-clock” hours for professionals, where employees can work as late as needed but non-essential work emails are held from being delivered until the next business day. These policies could restore some semblance of boundaries around when work should have a claim on family time. It should come as no surprise that Senator Elizabeth Warren, who both is earnest about her pro-parent bona fides and has never met a problem she didn’t think new government regulation could solve, has proposed legislation that would tackle these issues and more.
Asking America’s employers to put up with an, at times, marginally less productive workforce in the name of a more pro-family society is a tradeoff authentic conservatives should be willing to make. Those allowances can be made, even enforced, without a revolution in labor law. Carving out these new expectations, whether they be voluntary best practices or legislative mandates, could continue to make life more parent-friendly in the same way the COVID remote-work boom did.
For workers as well, remote work can have its downsides. It’s not just the reduced efficiency once someone is juggling diapers and sales calls. I can attest with humiliating frequency that even the cutest drooling interruption on a video call is, nonetheless, an interruption. Without the forced socialization of the office, it can lead some towards increasing isolation. Without an intentional focus on the infrastructure of civic and family life, remote work could become the worst of both worlds, rather than the best of them. By giving parents the option of having one foot at work and one in parenthood, they might be fully present in neither.
An America with more parents working from home will need to rebuild the connective social tissue of previous generations. We could envision some well-crafted carveouts to liability law, as needed, to allow cafes to offer play spaces and a soundproof booth or two where parents might take a call. Cities or neighborhoods could host drop-in babysitting with free Wi-Fi at local parks, helping remote workers to find community, particularly younger ones who never had the experience of a full, pre-COVID office. Churches could offer their Sunday school classrooms as co-working spaces, maybe selling coffee and pastries to help cover costs.
These ideas—and more—will require intentionality. They could help turn the option of remote or hybrid work into something authentically affirming, opening new opportunities for the dual role of parent and worker to complement each other. As childlessness rises and parenthood becomes increasingly self-selected, the burdens parents must bear, be they sleepless nights, day care bills, or having to say no to that important on-site with a client, become relatively more costly. Fiscal policy has some role to play in the out-of-pocket costs. But making family life more appealing could include recreating the best of the social and human benefits of the office without making parents feel like it’s an all-or-nothing game.
Tradeoffs are not improved by simply spending more on child benefits. Taking steps to make having kids less burdensome means changing the calculus facing parents and would-be parents. The new possibilities opened in a post-COVID landscape shouldn’t be unthinkingly foreclosed upon in the name of efficiency. Carving out space for more parents and would-be parents to balance their responsibilities at work and at home should be a pandemic legacy that sticks with us, even as the rest of the social revolution it ushered in fades blessedly into the rear-view mirror.