More smartphones, fewer children. The widespread diffusion of smartphones and social media has recently been added to the long list of reasons that discourage the desire for motherhood and childbearing. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the book The Anxious Generation, argues, for example, that the intensive use of smartphones and social media has profoundly transformed young people's social relationships. Some commentators have linked this thesis to the decline in dating, relationships, and therefore potentially birth rates. To summarize the reasoning: the boom in smartphones and social media, and their compulsive use, have profoundly transformed childhood and adolescence, contributing to an increase in mental health problems, social isolation, and a reduction in real-world experiences. If young people socialize less, partner later, and experience more fragile relationships, then in the long run, the birth rate could also decline.
Demographer Lyman Stone It's even more stark: smartphones, the internet, and digital entertainment are reducing the number of couples forming and the desire to have children. Digital technologies have changed the way people meet; build romantic relationships; spend their leisure time; and start families. In practice, part of the declining birth rate can be explained by the fact that the digital world is replacing some of the social interactions that once favored the creation of couples and families.
This narrative that calls into question technology (and soon the relationship between the birth rate and Artificial Intelligence will also arrive) adds to the recurring motivations, which are:
- Very long education: people enter the job market late and postpone starting a family.
- Very high cost of living, and this discourages the plan of a family with children.
- High investment per child (“quality-quantity trade-off”): parents prefer to have few children and invest heavily in their education and well-being.
- Urbanization: children are no longer an economic resource for the family, but above all represent a cost.
- Female participation in education and work, which increases the opportunity cost of motherhood.
- Poor incentives for motherhood, and few solutions to encourage parental leave.
- Individualization of life choices: marriage, children and family become options and no longer socially obligatory steps.
- Competitive labor markets, and driven by performance anxiety, they make planning for large families more difficult.
to the University of Pennsylvania, which raises the stakes and frames the problem like this: "Modernity, in its current form, is incompatible with fertility at the replacement rate."
According to this idea, the deepest cause of the birth rate is not strictly economic, nor even linked to the dominance of technology, but rather the fact that the social organization of modern societies, and our lifestyles, make it difficult to maintain a fertility rate at the level of generational replacement. Everything else, including smartphones and social media or even the cost of living, are accelerators and amplifiers of transformations already underway.
His argument has also been developed in public posts and interviews. For example, in a discussion of the so-called "replacement rate arithmetic," he argues that a modern society needs many more families with three or more children to reach the generational replacement threshold, while contemporary institutions and incentives make this choice increasingly difficult.
The modernity he speaks of Fernández-Villaverde It dates back to the 20th century and is a set of epochal changes, which then multiplied at a frenetic pace with the boom in technology, such as for example the transition from an agricultural to an industrial and then service society, in which children are no longer an economic resource for the family as in rural economies. Or the secularization of Western societies: the ever decreasing weight of traditional religious norms on family and procreation is reduced. And again: the extreme individualism (which leads to do-it-yourself morality), the crisis of the idea of community and the relationships it implies, the presenteeism as a compass for life. The very institutions of modernity—school, labor market, cities, housing system, educational expectations—rationally push toward a number of children below replacement level. And for this reason, modernity, in its current form, is incompatible with a fertility rate of approximately 2,1 children per woman.
Let us remember that the threshold of 2,1 children per woman is the so-called replacement rate (replacement fertility rate): the average fertility rate required for one generation of women to be replaced by the next without population growth or decline (ignoring immigration). The value is not exactly 2 because a small proportion of children do not reach reproductive age and because slightly more boys than girls are born. What are we at today?
The values vary greatly from country to country.
- Italy: about 1,18 children per woman in 2024, one of the lowest levels in the world. Italy
- XNUMX-XNUMX business days: about 1,4–1,5.
- United States: about 1,6. United States
- South Korea: around 0,75–0,8, among the lowest recorded values. South Korea
- France: about 1,6–1,7, among the highest levels in Western Europe. France
- Mondo: about 2,2–2,3, still slightly above replacement level, but rapidly declining from over 5 children per woman in the 1960s.
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