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Is it the damn phones?. A new article from one of my favorite energy bloggers suggests that the cratering of fertility rates (which were stable for much of the late 20th century and early aughts) could be driven by the adoption of smartphones. I'm personally rather convinced by this hypothesis, as many of the other explanations given by both people on this forum (status) and in-real life (economics, fear about the future) fall apart with counter examples. You're really telling me that motherhood is now equally low status in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Africa to depress fertility below 2, or that middle-class young white people are so economically oppressed that they can't have kids? I don't buy it. The smartphone, and its related access to a 24/7, truly global media environment seems to the only material change that could cross so many geographic and cultural lines. There's also a ton of causal mechanisms: hypergamy for instagram baddies, less time interacting with people in person so fewer marriages and thus fewer babies, and atrophied social skills for when interactions do happen in the wild.
Of course a lot of the effects of the smartphone can't be decoupled from high-modernity in general and its culture of extreme convenience and isolation, nor from related technologies like social media and short-form video content. And the groups that seem to avoid this depression in fertility seem to avoid all of these technologies.
I haven't killed my smartphone just yet, but I did delete all my dating apps about a month ago and have stayed off of them for the longest time since I last had a girlfriend. More in person relationships for me in the future I hope.
Were you not aware of the long-running campaigns to promote contraception and reduce births in Third World countries? Decades of "having lots of kids like your mom and granny did is bad and wrong" are going to reduce the status of motherhood even in poor countries.
Family planning was and is seen as one of the panaceas for what ailed the developing countries. Get women educated and into the workforce to combat poverty, stop having lots of kids the majority of whom would probably die early, and those who survived would push up population figures which were already straining the resources of those countries, stop girls being married off early/having tons of kids, and the numbers would balance out by reducing deaths due to famine and disease and war, and the rising tide would lift all boats. China's One Child Policy was just the extreme implementation of that thinking.
Kindly note that little phrase "whether or when to have children". It's not just "space out pregnancies to be manageable so you have five kids over ten years or more", it's "decide if you want to have kids at all". Motherhood becomes low status when it's only the ignorant, rural, and poorest of the poor having so many kids just like in the old days.
Fertility declines show up before that messaging. 1800s Victorians, American frontier families, all sorts of people in strong economic positions. Status can’t have been it. I would guess the biggest contributor is technological: infant mortality drops and births drop to compensate.
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