ndela Kirsebom Thommessen norway nordic mom Former supermodel Vendela Kirsebom Thommessen in Norway. Agnete Brun / Getty

Norway has solved a problem that's plaguing countries ranging from Spain to Italy to South Korea to Japan: babies.

Those countries don't have enough kids being born to maintain their populations, and it's turning into high-stakes economic problems

Norway's solution: making it easier for people (especially women) to combine raising kids and pursuing careers — the elusive work-life balance. 

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the "ideal of the housewife" was strong in Norway

Fertility rates followed what you might call a traditional logic: the less women worked, the more babies were born. 

But then women started seeking economic agency. So they went to work: from the early 1970s to the 2010s, the female labor participation rate rose from 44% to 76%

When women enter into the workforce, society needs to provide the structure to raise kids and pursue careers at the same time. Otherwise, says Richard Jackson, president of the nonprofit research group Global Aging Institute, women will have fewer kids. 

It becomes clear when you look at how fertility rate correlates with women's labor participation in developed countries.

TI_Graphics_Fertility and labor force Skye Gould/Tech Insider

In 2014, Norway (the happiest country on Earth) had one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. At the same time, 83% of women with young children work.

norwegian royal family Ragnar Singsaas / Getty

A handful of social welfare programs helped encourage that growth: 

• State-sponsored daycare. Thanks to state subsidies, the cost of childcare is capped. In 2012, about 90% of all 1 to 5 year old kids were covered

• Parental leave. It's paid for by the state. In the 80s, it was 12 weeks. Now it's 47 weeks. And if fathers don't take all of their paternal leave, the total parental leave for the family gets shortened. 

• Sick days. If you have a child under that age 12, you get 10 days off a year to care for them, Slate reports. If you have two kids under 12, then it's 15  days off — and if you're a single parent, it's double either amount.  

As Christa Clapp, an American expat (and mother of two children) living in Norway, observes in the Washington Post, the maternity and paternity policies make economic sense. Fathers taking active parenting roles allows women to go back to work faster, and working mothers add to Norway's economy.

"One Norwegian lesson," former Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told the New York Times in 2011, "is that if you can raise female participation, it helps the economy, birth rates and the budget."

Social structures allow women in Norway to stay in their careers while raising children. 

Compare all this to Japan and South Korea, two countries in the middle of demographic crises. These countries don't have those same supports, which has led to extremely low fertility rates. Both Japan and South have demanding office cultures — think 11-hour days paired with obligatory boozy bonding sessions — and traditional gender roles at home, where women are expected to take care of the house and the kids. With those insane workloads, it's impossible to have a dual-earner family without paid help.

The below chart show the consequences those gender roles have for employment. In Japan and South Korea, huge percentages of women lean out of the workforce during the childrearing years of the late 20s through middle 40s, while in Norway and Finland more women stay in the workforce in that same time period — which can be inferred by the data represented here.

TI_Graphics_Women working (1) Skye Gould / Tech Insider

Economists in Japan and South Korea are making foreboding predictions about when the populations of each are slated to go extinct (don't get too freaked out just yet, it's 1000 years for Japan and 700 for South Korea, if there's any use to predicting things that far in advance).  

In a 2015 International Monetary Fund working paper, economists Yuko Kinoshita and Fang Guo found that countries like Norway have created social environments where it's easier to combine working and family life. So if East Asia is going to tackle its population crisis, it will need to look more like the Nordics.