Readers of these digital pages will be well aware of the ongoing global collapse in fertility rates, and may even have picked up some ideas as to why that’s the case. Have you considered however that some of the blame may be attributable to smartphones? Because that’s what one expert recently argued in a fascinating article, and it’s hard to deny that there’s something to it.
Think about it: A device that frequently captures your attention, often stealing it away from the person you might make a baby with. A device that conveys information to you that makes you feel sometimes better, but more often than not, worse. A device that – absolutely fascinatingly – supplies you with images that affect your desire to have children, as some research has shown. But more on that shortly.
Research Professor at the Finnish population research centre ‘Väestöliitto’ (‘Population Union’) Anna Rotkirch in a recent essay in the Berlin Review titled The TikTok Baby Bust made the compelling case that two globe-spanning events occurred in 2007 that affected birth rates in different ways: the onset of the financial crisis and the release of the first iPhone.
The effects of the former, through unemployment, confidence in the future and other well-documented phenomena, have been considered for some time now; the effects of the latter, surprisingly less so, given the now-omnipresence of that then-fledgling technology. However, those effects are now impossible to ignore, multifaceted as they are.
Writing a brief summary of her argument on X, Ms Rotkirch said that smartphones sped up the baby bust in at least three ways: life templates and aspirations; mental health; and sex, relationship formation and duration. As it was a framing of the issue, or perhaps more accurately, an approach to the issue, that I hadn’t considered before, I feel it is worth considering in the manner that Ms Rotkirch did.
Life templates
Ms Rotkirch notes that a research project she and her team conducted – the Finnish Family Barometer – showed some “unexpected changes” around 2015.
They found that the proportion of respondents who answered that they didn’t want children had tripled from the 1990s and 2000s (when the figure sat between four to five percent) to 15 percent in 2015. Ms Rotkirch writes: “A vast majority wanted two children, or more. But their rationale for delaying parenthood had shifted. Among the many reasons for currently not planning on having children, one in particular stood out: ‘I want to do other interesting things in life.’”
That finding was shored up by later research, both in Finland and further afield, and while I – a non-expert – understand the picture of people’s family formation and childrearing desires to be incomplete, that smartphones are having some considerable effect on people’s decision-making processes seems undeniable.
Ms Rotkirch pointed to a set of psychological experiments I’d never encountered before, but which very much gel with my experience and those of my married, parenting milieu – “Baby fever: Situational cues shift the desire to have children via empathic emotions”. From the abstract and impact statement of that study, carried out by psychologists Katherine Nelson-Coffey and Lisa Cavenaugh:
“The desire to have children is often regarded as a deep, biologically driven desire or a rational decision based on weighing costs and benefits. Based on these assumptions, many people believe that the desire to have children is unchanging. However, the studies presented here indicate that the desire to have children is readily shifted by subtle situational cues, such as advertisements and social media feeds depicting positive images of parents and children.
…
“These studies suggest that when young adults see images of parents and cute children, they feel a greater desire to have children of their own, in part because those images make them feel affectionate, compassionate, and caring. Given the abundance of parent–child images on social media and intense societal pressure to have children, small changes in the desire to have children may have implications for actual child-rearing behavior and overall emotional well-being.”
I would question that there’s currently “intense societal pressure to have children” – quite the opposite – but I suppose it depends where you’re coming from. Nevertheless, the researchers randomly assigned childless young adults to view images of parents and children against a control group, and after seeing pleasant parenting content, participants expressed a greater desire to have children themselves. Ms Rotkirch notes twofold that: the link from parenting picture to baby fever was not cognitive but emotional, and that merely seeing familial and parenting images is enough to affect how a person feels about having children.
However, she suggests that this mechanism works both ways – that if positive sentiments can be induced, so too can negative. And that’s precisely what is happening, out in the digital wilds, “anti-natal content” being as Ms Rotkirch puts it, “easy to find”.
She highlights ultra-viral TikTok trends that fixate on all of the negatives and potential disasters associated with having and raising children, and cites interviews she’s conducted with young women who’ve explicitly stated that such trends “made them ambivalent about having a child”.
So far, so simple, you might say; this is more so a social media issue than a smartphone issue, you might add. True, but taken in conjunction with the latter points – mental health and sex, relationship formation and duration – it’s undeniable that the smartphone embodies an unhealthy triad of phenomena for deciding to, or developing the capacity to, have children.
Mental Health
American social psychologist and wildly popular author, Jonathan Haidt, has done trojan work in exposing the deleterious effects of smartphones on mental health in both the US and other western countries, while other researchers have established the link between mental health difficulties and lower fertility. Loneliness, too, which is soaring in Europe, “can affect childbearing”, Ms Rotkirch writes, a trend that isn’t being helped by the breakdown in romantic structures and relationships.
Sex, relationship formation and duration
A few points will suffice to make clear the effect screens are having on relationships: Ms Rotkirch points to a systematic review her team conducted of both the positive and negative effects of screen use on “close family relationships, and especially parenting and romantic relationships”.
Screen use was found to be “especially negative” for couple stability and satisfaction for the following reasons: it affects sexual activity and satisfaction in relationships and it affects how much time romantic partners spend together.
While we hear frequently about the way in which sperm quality is being affected by environmental factors, and what input that may have on fertility rates (not so much currently, she says, despite acknowledging that it’s worrying), the apparent physiological links between screen use and sexual activity are relatively undiscussed.
Anecdotally, I concur. I cannot help but imagine that being an effect of screens being everywhere in the modern world, and so having attained the same degree of invisibility as the air in our daily lives as a result of sheer familiarity and exposure. But this is new, and it’s certainly not natural, and their effects have been demonstrated in different psychological and biological matters already, like eyesight and anxiety, among other things. Why couldn’t they affect sexual activity, complex behavioural set that that is?
Faced with the plummeting birth rates that we are, which will, as Ms Rotkirch writers, lead to “a profound change that will affect our economic, social and political lives in ways that are hard to envision,” every factor and its effect upon the decision to have children ought to be at least considered, if not even out of curiosity as to why we’re doing things so differently to the way people did them before.