Children

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | From the January 2026 issue

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........

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