A parallel between the demographic crisis and global warming is that for each, one side of the partisan divide largely doesn’t think it’s a problem at all. And for each side, the deniers are straight up wrong. Human caused global warming is essentially a fact. Declining demographics and the problems it causes are simply true. Being in denial of either of these is not a difference of opinion, but being wrong about the ample and sufficient evidence. Disagreeing about what to do about these problems once they are recognized is legitimate and complicated, so is disagreeing about some of the consequences, but, denying them as problems is going against reality.
Unfortunately, global warming has been coded as a liberal issue. The demographic crisis has been coded as a conservative issue. But neither of them them should have partisan or ideological coding. They are both real problems that are happening. The only disagreement should be what to do about these problems, not whether they are severe problems with difficult consequences, because that is in the realm of fact.
“”Flexibility at work has the power to drive fertility decisions,” according to researchers running a survey in the U.S. and 38 other countries.
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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.”
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Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that “it’s also plausible that parents with young children at home may select” work-from-home arrangements more often.
Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.
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A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw “a significant and persistent” 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These “fertility increases were concentrated among women in ‘greedy jobs’ with lower flexibility prior to lockdown,” according to the paper. “The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism,” rather than increased time due to job loss.
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It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.”
“Many more families might have benefited over the past couple of decades from similar treatments pioneered a quarter of a century ago, except that handwringing bioethicists helped to persuade the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to essentially ban them.”
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“Had the FDA stayed out of the way, many more families would have had the opportunity to use these and similar assisted reproduction technologies to have healthy children over the past 25 years.”
“Portuguese culture grants special privileges to children and families, and those privileges really do make a big difference. We’ve been to Lisbon, surf towns to the west, the Azores, and even Cabo Verde, the African island nation and former colony, where many of the same norms apply. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people traveling with young kids get special lines for airport security and customs, ushered through as fast as possible. Native Portuguese will get offended if they see you in the normal line, instructing you to go to the priority line and sometimes getting the attention of the customs officer to make sure the system is adhered to—the only time Southern Europeans have ever been rule-abiding!
Though their Northern European neighbors are strict about taxi cab car seat rules and paranoid about child safety on buses (in Norway they made me use a car seat), the Portuguese are relaxed about it, allowing parents to make whatever choices they deem best. This is helpful for those of us who don’t travel with car seats, preferring to use public transit wherever possible.
Their playgrounds allow lots of risky play. We availed ourselves of Lisbon’s Jardim da Estrela, which had plenty of climbing structures, including one extending more than 15 feet in the air, full of kids as young as 5 jousting for the top spot.
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In Lisbon, the public park facilities even had a miniature bathroom for potty-training kids, but you could also freely change a diaper on a park bench. The nearby day cares dressed kids for rain or shine, and they seemed to make outdoor time a habit. The moms did not hover—a refreshing contrast to Manhattan and Brooklyn—and there was a healthy mix of moms and dads handling the kids.
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At home in New York, I keep a list of fancy restaurants that tend to be welcoming toward babies and toddlers (Bonnie’s in Williamsburg, Cafe Gitane in Lower Manhattan), precisely because it feels like a rarity: Several restaurants have adopted policies disallowing children (Jean-Georges, Bungalow). In Portugal, it’s standard to see families out to dinner, and out quite late. Though the families don’t tend to be huge—Portugal has not been immune to the sinking-birthrate issues that have plagued the rest of the developed world—they are rebounding a bit from a 2013 low of 1.21 births per woman.
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But the Portuguese in particular grasp something I fear American parents miss: You don’t have to recede from society once you have children, relegated only to explicitly kid-friendly spaces. The way to get children to learn how to fly and dine in restaurants and act civilized in public is to include them, and to let them practice again and again. Of course, those reps are easier gotten when you have a surrounding culture that acts like children are a gift, not a burden. The grace with which Portuguese culture treats families makes it easier to bear when your kid inevitably messes up in public; everyone who witnesses the tantrum or the spilled glass seems to realize that this is a normal part of living alongside kids—a little cost worth bearing to have a society that’s warm and friendly and growing.”
Don’t spoil your daughters so that you can benefit society’s fertility rates.
Women tend to marry and have children based on their father’s, or the fathers’ around them when they grew up, income and wealth. So if daughters are spoiled, they are less likely to have children because less men will seem good enough to them.
Giving people cash to have babies works, just not very efficiently. It’s expensive. In the U.S., we’d get one baby per $200,000 to $400,000. Lifetime taxes paid by the average person is $150,000 to $400,000. So fiscally, the government may break even. Childless people are dependents on society so should pay higher taxes. Their future retirement depends on the labor of younger people, and younger people depend on the labor and money of parents.
“So why are birth rates falling all over the world? The authors knock down the conventional hypothesis that rising monetary costs are to blame. The real costs of children, they argue, are the opportunity costs: “what a potential parent would be ready to give up to have an extra child.” The seductions of the modern world include higher paying work, longer vacations, restaurant meals, sports, video games, innumerable on-demand entertainment options, and so forth. “Once we see that costs include opportunity costs, as life becomes richer and more rewarding, children cost more,” they say. “Even if we eliminated every dimension of social inequality and unfairness between women and men, the opportunity cost of having a child would still be greater in the richer, freer, better-entertained future than it was in the past.” And as demographic history shows, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay those costs.”