The advent of the iPhone nearly 20 years ago may have had a direct effect on declining birth rates, a new study argues.
The working study, published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research and which has not undergone peer review, claims the dissemination of iPhones, starting in 2007, explains a 33% to 52% decline in the U.S. birth rate among women ages 15 to 44.
The study was conducted by Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor, and her stepson, Ezekiel Hooper, a 2025 Middlebury College graduate. It hones in on where iPhones were available upon their launch between 2007 and 2011, when AT&T was the exclusive carrier for the smartphone. They then analyzed the birth rates, by county, in those areas.
In their working study, Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper argue U.S. counties with more concentrated AT&T coverage between 2007-2011 saw a decrease in birth rates due to the advent and accessibility of the iPhone.
For women in their 20s who lived in counties with "extensive" AT&T coverage, which meant more readily available access to iPhones, birth rates decreased by 14.6% between 2007 and 2011, Myers and Hooper wrote. Birth rates for women in their 20s who lived in counties with no AT&T coverage fell just 10%.
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Similarly, birth rates for teens who lived in counties with "near universal" AT&T coverage declined by 26% between 2007 and 2011, while birth rates for teens who lived in counties without coverage fell by 13.8%, the authors wrote.
While Myers and Hooper understand iPhone usage is not the sole reason birth rates declined between 2007 and 2011, Hooper told USA Today he was surprised by how drastic the study's findings were.
Sarah Hayford, director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, said though she is open to considering smartphones' effect on birth rates, she is skeptical of the studies' narrow focuses and how they affect the wider discussion around falling birth rates globally.
"I'm sort of more interested in thinking about what are the big-picture things driving really long-term changes in family formation and childbearing," she said.
Two more studies suggest similar findings
Myers and Hooper's publication follows two other working studies, published in April and June by the Social Science Research Network, which suggest smartphones and "the digital revolution" affected the decline in global births, as the technology affects how people spend time with one another. Both studies were authored by University of Cincinnati economics professor Hernan Moscoso Boedo and Ph.D. candidate Nathan Hudson.
The latter of the two studies found 43% of the U.S. fertility decline since 2007 can be attributed to digital technology becoming cheaper and more accessible and improving in quality, Hudson said.
"The digital revolution has fundamentally reshaped how humans interact with one another, favoring broad and shallow connections at the expense of the deeper ones that require sustained in-person investment," Moscoso Boedo and Hudson state in their most recently published study. "As digital technology reallocates household time … deep relationships erode, partnerships form less often, the partnerships that do form are weaker and conditional fertility falls."
Smartphones and other digital technology don't make people want children less, they are just replacing the in-person time that relationships, which may lead to children, are built on, Hudson explained.
Mackenzie Barto fixes her tassel using her smartphone as a mirror June 5 during commencement exercises at Shasta High School in Redding, Calif.
A narrow focus into teen birth rates
The three studies all analyze a decrease in teen birth rates, claiming technology is changing how young people interact. Hudson and Moscoso Boedo's working study, published in April, specifically analyzes how smartphones affected teen birth rates, starting in 2007.
Because more teens hang out online, Hudson said, they have less "unstructured, in-person time." Hudson and Moscoso Boedo's teen birth rate study specifically cites the American Time Use Survey, which documented a 44% decline in in-person socializing among teens between ages 15 and 19 from 2003 to 2019.
In their study, Myers and Hooper saw the largest decline — 4.5% to 8% between 2007 and 2011 — among girls ages 15 to 19, the study outlines.
"The implications for why smartphones are causing this teen birth decline we're seeing, we can't necessarily explain the cause of what they're doing on these smartphones and the changes in their behavior, we just know that smartphones are the piece playing a role in it," Hooper said.
Myers and Hooper pointed to a few factors considered in the study, including the time people spend with friends, one's sexual behaviors, psychological distress and a widely spread increase in search interest in pornography and X-rated movie viewing.
Generally, teen birth rates declined in the U.S. for decades, Hayford pointed out.
Teen birth rates fell 78% from 1991 to 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For some of Hollywood's biggest stars, family life has grown just as rapidly as their careers. While many parents stop at one or two children, a handful of famous dads have welcomed six, seven, or even eight kids over the years. Brad Pitt shares six children with his ex-wife Angelina Jolie. Their family includes Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, and twins Knox and Vivienne. The ‘F1’ actor adopted Maddox and Zahara early in his relationship with Jolie, before the couple went on to expand their family with both adopted and biological children. In recent years, reports have suggested that Pitt has become estranged from some of his children, with several choosing to use the Jolie surname publicly. Robert De Niro is also part of Hollywood's large-family club. The Oscar winner became a father for the seventh time in 2023 when he and girlfriend Tiffany Chen welcomed daughter Gia. His children range in age from toddlers to adults in their 50s, with the ‘Taxi Driver’ actor having children across four different relationships. With eight children by six different women, Clint Eastwood stands out as one of Hollywood's most prolific fathers. His sprawling family includes daughters Laurie, Kimber, Alison, Kathryn, Francesca, and Morgan, along with sons Kyle and Scott. One of the most remarkable stories in Eastwood's family involves his eldest daughter Laurie, who was placed for adoption at birth without his knowledge in 1954. Decades later, she discovered her famous father, and the pair eventually built a close relationship.
"In the U.S., at least, we have pretty good evidence about declining teen birth rates, starting around 2007 in that five- to 10-year period. And the evidence we have suggests the reason birth rates fell among teens … is because of increased contraceptive use and not because of less having sex," Hayford said. "That seems kind of not consistent with the mechanism that these studies are proposing, that socializing online kind of displaces socializing offline, including having sex."
Hayford said the evolution of communication technology has long had an impact on declining birth rates, citing studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s that suggested the rollout of radio and television, which depicted families with just two children, disseminated the idea that smaller families were more desirable. Today, this could be translated into parenting content on social media platforms like TikTok, she said.
"Falling fertility rates is something that's happening all over the world in all sorts of age groups and very different contexts, and as we're thinking about explanations for that, we want to think about the big picture and the long term, and I'm not sure that these micro, super-focused studies are the most helpful way to think about the picture changes and trends," Hayford said.
