Work, Love, and Empty Cradles: How Labor Culture Is Quietly Sabotaging Birth Rates in China — and Beyond

Thursday, May 29, 2025

What If the Real Birth Control Was the 50-Hour Workweek?

China’s demographic nosedive is no longer a story of population control. It’s the slow collapse of future planning under fluorescent lights.

While Beijing scrambles to undo the legacy of the one-child policy with baby bonuses and ads that could double as recruitment campaigns, young people are staring down 60-hour workweeks and choosing… not to reproduce.

A new study in Biodemography and Social Biology offers a clear villain: time scarcity.

Researchers Zhao, Li, and Li used data from the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) — a massive national survey — and found that those who work more than 40 hours a week are significantly less likely to plan for children.

And it’s not just the hours, but the type of work: weekends, night shifts, and 24/7 on-call expectations are particularly corrosive to fertility intentions.

And no, this isn’t just a China problem. This is the canary in the coal mine for every nation where hustle culture has become a second religion.

The Global Work-Fertility Tradeoff: China and the U.S. on Parallel Tracks

While China's work culture is visibly intense — driven by an industrial-era hangover mixed with startup hyper-productivity — the U.S. has quietly normalized a similar pathology. In America, the language of overwork is coded in choice: "side hustle," "entrepreneur," "career girl," "grindset." You can have it all, the culture whispers, but only if you never sleep.

And yet, U.S. fertility rates are also hitting record lows.

According to the CDC, the U.S. total fertility rate has hovered around 1.6 for years — well below the replacement level of 2.1. Financial stress is often blamed, but surveys by Pew Research show another driver: people feel overwhelmed. Not poor, just saturated — with options, obligations, and digital expectations that stretch well past midnight.

The result? Fewer babies, more burnout, and a generation quietly opting out of reproduction not for lack of desire, but because life has been engineered to make it logistically impossible.

Time Poverty vs. Choice Overload

China’s birth rate is being stifled by time poverty — working hours that make basic human connection feel like a luxury good. But in the U.S., it’s often choice overload that’s the villain. Too many options, too many self-optimization narratives, too many lifestyle products sold as identity. Becoming a parent isn’t just a decision anymore; it’s a brand risk. What if you fall off the “career track”? What if your Instagram shifts from flat whites to flatulence?

In both contexts, the logic is the same: children are being postponed, then postponed again, until they quietly disappear from the story entirely.

Overtime and the Death of the Future

Back to China. The CFPS data paints a grim portrait:

• 40–50 hours/week: The sharpest drop in childbearing intention.

• 50–60+ hours/week: Fertility intentions stay low, and often collapse into total disengagement.

• Weekend/Night Shifts: Strongly associated with lower interest in starting or expanding families.

• Always On-Call: Psychological availability to work translates into emotional unavailability to partners.

This isn’t just about physical exhaustion. This is about the erosion of mental rehearsal — the ability to imagine a future with someone else in it, particularly someone under three feet tall and drooling on your shoulder.

Women Pay the Highest Price

Women in the study showed a stronger negative response to overtime than men. No shock there. Despite progress, women globally continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid labor — the invisible second shift of caregiving and housework. Add overtime to the mix, and the dream of motherhood becomes something squeezed between work emails and a half-hearted dinner.

Even worse: flexible workplace benefits were shown to increase fertility intentions — suggesting the problem isn’t biological hesitation but structural entrapment.

The Invisible Work of Imagining a Family

The researchers found that people with flexible hours, maternity insurance, and clear paths for promotion were more likely to want children. In other words, when the workplace respects your humanity, you feel safe enough to create more humans.

Contrast that with the American gig economy, where jobs are flexible — but only for the company. Workers are disposable, schedules are chaotic, and benefits are either minimal or mythical. In this context, family life becomes an unstable investment.

If a culture doesn’t give you time, it doesn’t deserve your children.

The Therapist’s Chair: A Familiar Silence

In therapy rooms around the world, this quiet deterrent comes up again and again. “We want kids… just not now.” “We can barely see each other.” “Our jobs are killing our sex life.” These aren’t disinterested couples. They are overextended ones. Their libidos, their timelines, even their intimacy rituals — all slowly dismantled by schedules no human being designed.

This is what cognitive dissonance looks like in family systems: where love exists, desire flickers, but the system chokes out any chance to act on it. And that’s exactly what Zhao and colleagues found — work schedules produce not just exhaustion, but ambivalence, a flatlining of reproductive imagination.

Toward a Morality of Time

This isn’t a morality tale about selfishness.

It’s a more of a moral question about time allocation.

The decision not to have children — in China, in the U.S., globally — is increasingly less about individualism and more about context. How does one build a nest in a forest fire?

The implication for policy?

We need to stop pretending that fertility is a private whim. It is a public consequence of economic architecture. Long work hours, unstable benefits, digital tethering — these are not personal choices. They are policy choices, cultural choices, design choices.

And people are responding rationally. They’re not lazy. They’re not anti-family. They’re exhausted.

What Would It Take?

• Workweek reform: Not just in name, but in enforcement.

• Real flexibility: Control over one’s time is more powerful than financial incentives.

• Supportive structures: Maternity insurance, childcare subsidies, and fair promotions aren't “perks.” They are fertility policies in disguise.

• Cultural permission to rest: Without shame. Without performance.

In short: a world where time is not devoured by productivity cults might just be one where children are not seen as threats to ambition.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Zhao, J., Li, Y., & Li, W. (2024). Reasons for the continued decline in fertility intentions: Explanations from overtime work. Biodemography and Social Biology. https://doi.org/10.1080/19485565.2024.XXXXXX

Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS). (2020). China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), 2020. Peking University.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2023). Births: Provisional Data for 2022. National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/births.htm

Pew Research Center. (2021). Why Americans are having fewer babies. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/05/05/why-americans-are-having-fewer-babies/

Hook, J. L., & Paek, E. (2020). Work–family policies and fertility in OECD countries: A comparative perspective. Population Research and Policy Review, 39(2), 243–269. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-019-09536-x

Mathews, P., & Brinton, M. C. (2019). The reproduction of gender inequality: Family policies and education in South Korea and Japan. Social Politics, 26(2), 281–305. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxy020