By Alexander Puutio,Contributor
Copyright forbes
The future that keeps you accountable
The most important numbers in our economy have never been more dire.
In the U.S., birth rates have slipped to 1.62, far below the 2.1 replacement rate, and further still from the 2.8 some demographers now argue is needed when accounting for mortality trends. South Korea is at 0.72, and even China, the most populous country on earth, has fallen to 1.0.
Many know the numbers by heart after how often they’ve been repeated in headlines, but few have really come to grips with how they underpin the fate of everything we care about.
And if you’ve spent more than a hot moment inside a modern corporate cubicle, you’ve already met one of the major reasons for this decline firsthand, whether you noticed it or not.
The modern workplace is simply not built for parenthood. Worse yet, in many cases it’s actively hostile to it.
We’ve designed work in a way that quietly undermines the very people it relies on to propagate it. It’s a bit like a virus that burns through their hosts too quickly, only to discover that short-term virulence is an evolutionary dead end. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s instructive, given how viruses that last have had to adapt to not killing the next generation of its hosts. COVID-19, once deadly enough to stop the global economy in its tracks, now barely registers as a bad cold for most.
If work intends to survive, it will have to strike a similar equilibrium with parenthood, whether it wants to or not. And while much of corporate America is still stuck in outdated patterns that make working parenthood impossible, some leaders are already bending the rules to make work work for humanity, not just the bottom line.
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Bugaboo on taking parenting seriously
There are companies that make parenting easier by creating products that help parents, and then there are companies that make parenting easier by changing how they work internally. Bugaboo is doing its best to do both.
When Adriaan Thierry took the helm as CEO, he came across an old photograph of himself pushing his kids in the first Bugaboo model. “That image stayed with me,” he says in an interview. “It reminded me that what we build is tied to the moments parents remember for the rest of their lives. You can’t fake that mission or how it feels. I felt it myself.”
Bugaboo’s products have long carried the philosophy of having been designed for life, both by creating products that excel in longevity and by making active parenthood as easy as possible.
Inside the company, the same philosophy seems to apply.
Jeanelle Teves, Bugaboo’s North America CCO, puts it plainly: “We build our products around parenthood, and we do the same with our internal processes. The work adjusts to the needs of parenting without missing a beat. Productivity is not the enemy of flexibility or vice versa.”
For Teves, the company’s model hits a personal note. Her own workdays adjust to the demands of organizing the lives of their children, and her role allows her husband to be a stay-at-home dad, a role too few men have the opportunity to take on today.
“Parenting isn’t a side gig and it can’t be treated as something to be outsourced to others so mom and dad can get back to what really matters. Parenting is one of the most creative, high-stakes leadership roles you’ll ever have and if we’re honest, it’s by far the most rewarding one no matter what we tell our resumes. If we can’t design workplaces to honor that, then what exactly are we building them for?”
Thierry agrees. “The parenthood moment is fleeting. You blink and your children are grown. Companies that don’t enable people to be present for that are robbing them of something irreplaceable. And frankly, they’re robbing society of future parents.”
One of the subtle yet powerful shifts that make working parenthood possible is releasing people from the theatrics of performance.
“What matters is the outcome,” Teves says. “I’ve had team members deliver some of their best work from a laptop in the school parking lot. If you trust people, they’ll give you the results. What doesn’t make sense is forcing a mom or dad to sit through an hour-long all-hands during daycare pick-up just so we can see their face on a screen. That’s not culture, that’s control.”
Thierry goes further, and calls for companies to recognize parenthood as something that is worth actively encouraging. “Parents bring a different kind of focus, resilience, and perspective to the table. They’re constantly prioritizing what really matters, and they’ve learned to operate under conditions most executives would find impossible. If you lose that from your workforce because you’ve made it too hard to be both successful and a parent, you’ve lost far more than a headcount.”
That’s exactly the pivot more companies need to make. We can’t afford to treat success and parenthood as mutually exclusive paths, instead, we must begin recognizing them as mutually reinforcing ones.
Building and parenting aren’t mutually exclusive
For decades, women, especially mothers, were told often explicitly that they had to choose between career and children. And while plenty of men have felt this tension too, the burden of proof has historically fallen on women, who already bear the brunt of parenthood due to the pure logistics of the whole affair.
Kait Stephens, CEO and co-founder of Brij, remembers these tensions and how they are laid upon junior staff members well. “The unspoken rule was clear everywhere you went. You can be a parent, or you can be someone whose career takes off. Not both. At least not successfully.”
She now runs a growing retail tech company that helps brands turn retail sales into direct customer relationships. And she’s building it while raising a family, without having missed a step in either realm.
“Don’t get me wrong, starting a company while parenting is hard work. But they’re not mutually exclusive. What’s incompatible is the old corporate playbook, the one that sees parenthood as an inconvenience rather than a reality to design for.”
Stephens has made a point of modeling what parenthood could look like, if only we allowed it.
What she’s modeling is not the supermom trope, but the grounded version that acknowledges the messy, exhausting, and deeply worthwhile balance.
“I’m intentional about showing the full picture. Sometimes that means leaving at three for a school event, sometimes it means logging back in after bedtime. It’s not glamorous, but it’s honest.”
And it is also deeply rewarding.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Stephens says. “Building this company and raising my kids have both been the most challenging and fulfilling things I’ve ever done. It’s a shame that, in many places, you have to build your own rules to make that balance possible. Too often, parenthood is treated as an inconvenience rather than a reality to design for. The truth is, when you design for it, you don’t just make life better for parents, you can make better companies too.”
Some leaders had to walk away from prestigious roles to find that balance for themselves and their companies.
Skye Amundsen was a high-powered attorney when she realized the work wasn’t just unfulfilling, it was incompatible with the life she wanted, which is now the life of a co-founder of hope&plum and a mother of four.
“It’s called golden handcuffs for a reason. You tell yourself you’ll leave when it’s a better time, but there’s never a better time. You tell yourself the company cares about you and your career, but you see your colleagues being let go because they missed a target that was never going to be met.”
Amundsen eventually made the leap, launching a brand built around supporting parents with functional, beautifully designed baby carriers to help carry and care for their babies.
“To make that transition, I needed three things, an idea worth betting on, someone who believed in me, and the willingness to believe in myself. Most people don’t have the breathing room to gather all three while working in a demanding legal career, especially if you’re already raising children. I was lucky to find mine.”
The transition was brutal, she admits.
“It felt like dismantling an identity I’d spent years building. But even on the hardest days, I now know I am building something that works for me and my family, not against it. And nothing is as rewarding as being able to fully show up for both my work and my kids.”
Indeed, sometimes being a parent yourself can hand you the blueprint for creating products and workplaces that actually work for people.
Parent-ready cultures are the real products we need
Shaker Rawan, former Google leader and founder of Woddle, created his AI-powered smart changing pad and monitor after his second child was diagnosed with “failure to thrive”.
“We were tracking growth on scraps of paper and trying to piece together insights across doctor visits. I realized that there was no meaningful solution for continuous health monitoring in the home.”
For Rawan, the product’s roadmap is shaped directly by what parents want, but also by a deeper mission: “We’re fixing the infrastructure problem. Pediatric care doesn’t stop at the hospital door, and the tools parents have at home should reflect that. Woddle collects baby’s vitals with every diaper change and streams it to pediatricians when needed. And while we’re fixing the product side, we’re paying attention to building the right culture inside our own company.”
If there’s a thread that ties these leaders together, it’s that they see culture, not perks, not policies, not PR, as the real product when it comes to enabling parenthood.
Thierry puts it bluntly: “You can have all the parental leave in the world on paper, but if your culture punishes you for using it by treating you like a traitor for leaving the team, it’s meaningless.”
Stephens agrees. “Culture is what allows you to pick up your kid at noon without apologizing, or take a call from the playground without hiding it.”
And Amundsen adds a final note that should make every CEO’s ears perk up: “Parenthood teaches you skills every business needs, prioritization, adaptability, long-term thinking. If you drive those people out of your company because you can’t make space for them, you’re hurting your business as well.”
If we want societies and the companies that run them to thrive, we have to start seeing parenting not as a detour from productivity, but as one the one thing we can’t quite literally live without.
And that means building workplaces where the next generation isn’t just welcome, but possible.
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