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Where Have All the Babies Gone?
Mascha Brichta/dpa-tmn
What caused the global baby slump? A new study offers an explanation for the declining birth rates since 2007—though it’s different from what many headlines suggest.
Why are people having fewer and fewer children? Is it high housing costs? Is it economic uncertainty? Is it changing lifestyles? The fact that birth rates are falling almost everywhere in the world has been a concern for demographers for years. At first, only wealthy industrialized nations were affected. But starting in 2007, the baby slump became a global trend.
Now, a new study from the U.S. is causing a stir. It introduces another possible factor—and with it, an explanation for why similar phenomena have been observed in more than 100 countries for nearly 20 years.
The researchers claim to have identified a veritable “smartphone shock,” referring to a striking temporal correlation. In many countries, birth rates—particularly among teenagers—plummeted around the same time that smartphones became a mass phenomenon: the first iPhone hit the market in 2007.
What’s astonishing is that this trend is evident in countries that are otherwise hardly comparable. Whether rich or poor, religious or secular, with a strong or weak welfare state—almost everywhere, the number of births declined significantly starting in the late 2000s. The study found similar patterns in 128 countries, including Switzerland, Germany, the United States, and England and Wales.
The authors’ explanation sounds simple at first. In the past, young people mainly met where other young people were: in public squares, at shopping malls, at parties, or after school. With the advent of the smartphone, part of this social life shifted to the digital realm. Those who wanted to hang out with friends increasingly rarely had to leave the house to do so.
Data from the U.S. illustrates this shift quite clearly. While teenagers in the early 2000s still spent significantly more time interacting with peers in person, the time spent on digital interactions increased sharply.
Many researchers find it plausible that this also led to fewer teenage pregnancies. Fewer real-life encounters simply mean fewer opportunities for spontaneous relationships. This correlation appears repeatedly in the data. So are we now going extinct because we’re constantly swiping?
No. The study does not claim that smartphones have triggered the global baby crisis. Above all, the researchers find a strong correlation between the widespread use of smartphones and the sharp decline in the birth rate among teenage girls. Girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 19 are less likely to have unintended pregnancies.
Among women over 25—the age group that accounts for about 80 percent of all births—there is no comparable effect. At the same time, the authors point out that the decline in teenage births had already begun before the rise of the smartphone. The devices likely reinforced this trend, but did not trigger it.
The study concludes that changes in young people’s behavior patterns could explain part of the decline. Other studies also find evidence that young adults today enter relationships later, move in together later, and start families later.
Nevertheless, there is no definitive explanation for the global decline in birth rates. Experts point out that economic factors, education, social changes, and political conditions continue to play a major role. The smartphone is more of another piece of the puzzle than the sole solution.
Nevertheless, the research has struck a chord. That’s because it describes something many people recognize from their own experience: social life has changed fundamentally over the past 15 years. Dates, flirting, friendships, and relationships often begin on a screen these days.
Whether this will also influence the number of families formed in the long term is a question that will keep researchers busy for some time to come. One thing is certain: the striking drop in births among teenagers starting around 2007 is one of the most remarkable demographic developments of recent decades—and the smartphone is on the list of suspects.
