Picture a young couple staring at a spreadsheet, not a sonogram. Between rent, daycare and a commute that eats up two hours a day, a second child feels out of reach.
Now flip one switch: both parents work from home a day or two each week.
New research from Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University and a team of colleagues shows that this single change shifts real family decisions. Evidence on flexible arrangements and fertility intentions in dual-earner couples, paired with U.S. analyses linking pandemic-era flexibility to higher births, points to a simple conclusion: if the Trump administration and cultural conservatives want more babies, they should encourage more remote work.
In 2023, U.S. fertility fell to 1.62 children per woman, with 3.596 million births, resuming a pre-pandemic slide. The question is which policies change day-to-day life enough to move births.
Working from home trims commutes, thus returning valuable hours to households. A parent can handle a pediatric visit without blowing up a shift schedule. Mom can breastfeed without logistical relays. Dad can cover school pickup without hiring a costly nanny.
One U.S. analysis documented a baby bump in 2021 and early 2022, strongest among college-educated women, aligning with the population most able to use hybrid work. Women with remote options were more likely to report plans to try for a child. New research on dual-earner couples shows how schedule control translates into realized family plans.
Remote work is not going away. The Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes shows hybrid has stabilized since 2023, with U.S. workers performing roughly a quarter of paid days from home in 2025. That persistence matters because fertility planning responds to expected conditions, not temporary perks. A policy that institutionalizes two at-home days per week delivers hard time in a soft way. It is a structural fix to the everyday frictions that push families to stop at one child.
Many on the right propose monthly family benefits or expanded child tax credits. That conversation is overdue. But cash stipends alone rarely deliver durable fertility gains.
Americans want help with practical barriers: child care affordability and better maternal health outcomes, according to an AP-NORC survey from July 2025. About three-quarters say child care costs are a major problem. This gap between elite pronatalist rhetoric and household priorities is instructive. People want support that makes everyday life with kids workable.
Hybrid work changes a binding constraint every week without a massive fiscal outlay. When one or both partners gain even one remote day, time reappears. That time lets a parent keep a job through a rough pregnancy, attend a 2:30 school concert, or start dinner at 5:30 instead of 6:45. The evidence on flexible work and fertility intentions reinforces that flexibility moves the needle because it attacks the real constraint, which is not so much money as it is time.
The most robust data show that hybrid has settled into a sustainable equilibrium. Well-run hybrid teams sustain performance while widening the pool of family-stage talent. Where remote is infeasible, targeted schedule control and paid time for essential family logistics emulate the same benefits.
Conservatives argue that families, not bureaucracies, should decide how to raise children. Remote work helps them do exactly that. It returns hours without dictating how to use them. It supports marriage, childrearing and church engagement by making home a functional base rather than a staging area between commutes.
Remote options let a dad accept a quality job without moving away from grandparents who provide informal child care. They let a mom maintain attachment to work during early childhood, cushioning earnings and career progression. The work-from-home literature documents durable levels of hybrid work across dozens of countries.
Policy can amplify those gains. The federal government should model best practices where duties allow.
In January 2025, the Office of Personnel Management issued guidance directing a broad return to in-person work. The federal conversation has featured blanket mandates, even as a 2025 GAO report flagged weaknesses of one-size-fits-all approaches. A smarter pro-family stance would normalize predictable hybrid schedules in eligible roles.
In addition, infrastructure policy should make flexibility real outside big metro areas. Expanding reliable high-speed internet in rural counties enables hybrid options that keep young families near church networks, cousins and babysitting grandparents. Public data on work-from-home rates helps employers and policymakers calibrate hybrid norms to different sectors and regions.
Skeptics ask whether flexibility distracts from reviving births. The evidence points the other way. When flexibility arrived suddenly during the pandemic, births among U.S.-born women ticked up, reversing a long decline. Newer work explains why: when couples can allocate time more sanely, they follow through on family plans. Pair that with the global stabilization of hybrid work and you get a practical lever, not a fad.
Families keep telling leaders the same thing: make everyday life with kids workable and we will respond. Work from home does exactly that. It collapses the distance between paychecks and playrooms, trims invisible costs that choke the evening routine, and preserves careers during the most fragile years of family formation.
If the Trump administration and cultural conservatives are serious about reversing the baby bust, they should embrace the most conservative tool of all: giving families the freedom to organize their own lives.
Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and authored the best-seller “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.”
