Birth rates have been declining since the early 2000s, not just in the United States but also in much of the rest of the world.
Some of that is explained by better sexual education, widespread access to contraception, and tougher economic conditions that make raising kids less financially feasible or desirable. Now, some researchers believe they have found yet another driver, a technology that entered our lives around the same time in the early 2000s and has since completely taken over society: the smartphone.
In a new working paper published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, two researchers from Middlebury College laid out just how America’s biggest smartphone, Apple’s iPhone, could have had a hand in declining birth rates.
Because the iPhone was sold exclusively through AT&T from its 2007 launch until February 2011, the researchers treated AT&T mobile broadband coverage as a proxy for early iPhone access. They then compared birth rates in counties covered by AT&T’s network with those in counties that had little or no AT&T mobile broadband access.
“The iPhone, and the smartphone era it inaugurated, materially accelerated the post-2007 U.S. fertility decline,” the researchers write. All in all, the study estimates that the iPhone accounted for up to 52% of the birth rate decline between 2007 and 2011.
Combining the findings with national survey data, the researchers point to three likely mechanisms by which the iPhone impacted birth rates. First, the unprecedented online connectivity and social media renaissance brought by widespread smartphone adoption meant that the iPhones became substitutes for in-person interactions. So the more that iPhones became the go-to medium of socialization, the less people hung out in person, and fewer sexual encounters could take place.
Second, the iPhone meant easier access to on-demand pornography, which could have served as a substitute for sex for some people.
“As modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex,” the researchers wrote.
Lastly, for those who were still having sex, the smartphone provided better access to information on contraception and abortion, which the researchers theorize could have brought down the rate of unintended pregnancies.
Although the effect was observed in all age groups, the researchers note that it was particularly strong for young people.
Gen Z is the first generation to have largely grown up with widespread smartphone use. They are also considered the major victims of direct mental health problems that experts claim are a result of this type of upbringing. Prominent American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has become the face of a growing global regulatory movement to ban minors from social media, and he argues in his book “The Anxious Generation” that the abundance of smartphones in puberty fundamentally rewired the brains of people born after 1995. Incidentally, Gen Z is often criticized online for having less sex than other generations.
In a separate but related working paper from April, researchers at the University of Cincinnati claim that teen fertility across 128 countries began a dramatic decline after 2007, around the time smartphones became a mass phenomenon. Using a design similar to the other paper, the researchers then compared county-level high-speed mobile network data with teen fertility rates and found a relationship similar to that outlined in the NBER working paper.
As smartphones “changed how teens spend time with each other,” the researchers wrote, teen fertility rates dropped further around the globe. But that drop was also accompanied by a surge in some troubling statistics.
“The same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides,” the study claims.
