Declining birth rate traced back to smartphone use

Headache? It's the smartphone. Nauseous? It's the smartphone. Depressed? It's the smartphone. Just when you thought there was nothing else left to blame these devices for, declining birth rates and the loss of our most basic human features, our capacity to socialise and reproduce, are apparently next on the list.

New studies link smartphones to birth rates

Two new studies, one published in May and another in early June, have suggested a strong link between consistent mobile phone and social media use and the decline in birth rates. They are the first academic studies to probe whether smartphones are contributing to declining birth rates.

Birth rates have been declining worldwide in recent centuries. At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, rates actually stabilised in high- and middle-income countries, but this stabilisation gave way to a decline around 15 years ago. 

Birth rates in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, which include the Netherlands, have halved since 1960. And in the first quarter of 2025, migration was the sole driver of population growth in the Netherlands. Alongside an ageing population, this doesn’t bode well for maintaining the balance between the working-age and retired populations required for a stable social security system.

What is particularly interesting about the shift 15 years ago is that it happened not just in countries with similar economic or cultural developments, but across the world, from the US and the UK to Brazil, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and Iran. This shift roughly coincides with Apple’s iPhone launch in 2007.

The study published in May found that iPhone usage accounted for as much as half of the decline in the birth rate in US counties between 2007 and 2011. The study published in June, which analysed World Bank data on smartphone prevalence and teenage fertility rates across 128 countries, found that declines in teenage fertility accelerated as smartphones became widespread.

Why might smartphones lead to lower birth rates?

In recent years, declining birth rates have often been attributed to economic and cultural shifts, more women choosing not to have children, a shortage of affordable housing or childcare, and the rising cost of living.

Financial Times (FT) reporter John Burn-Murdoch has also been looking at the figures and says that while economic factors, specifically housing, are accelerating the decline in the birth rate, this isn’t the whole story. Burn-Murdoch is inclined to agree with the two recent studies.

So why might smartphones lead to lower birth rates? Burn-Murdoch says this is a “simple question of time use”. “[T]he amount of time young people spend socialising in person has fallen very steeply from the late 2000s in high-income countries through to the present day,” he told the FT News Briefing podcast.

“The deep, strong relationships that lead to things like marriage, perhaps children, are the result of a lot of time hanging out with people to get there,” Burn-Murdoch explained.

“You hang out with a lot of people to find the right person, and then you hang out with that person long enough to settle down. And if we are simply hanging out a lot less, by some measures half as much as we used to, then that process is gonna take a lot longer if it happens at all."

According to the study published in June, the proliferation of pornography online may also be a contributing factor. Authors Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper suggest that when young people aren’t meeting up and building sexual relationships, pornography is filling this gap. On the other hand, young people’s increased access to information about pregnancy and contraception could also play a role.

Myers added, “You shouldn’t take the result so literally and say: Oh, it’s the iPhone’s fault,” but that the results were “an example of the kinds of social influences that have led to the decline in birth rate.”