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.