# Are home prices and social media the reasons we're having even fewer babies?

**Published by:** [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/)
**Published on:** 2026-05-18
**Categories:** housing, home-prices, financial-times, fertility, children, urbanism, cities
**URL:** https://brandondonnelly.com/are-home-prices-and-social-media-the-reasons-were-having-even-fewer-babies

## Content

Now that we are expecting our first child, it appears to me like everyone around us is also having babies. This is almost certainly some kind of frequency bias at work, because I know that the fertility rate in Canada is officially ultra-low (the technical term) and falling globally. According to a recent Financial Times article by John Burn-Murdoch, two-thirds of the world's countries are now averaging a fertility rate below the replacement rate of 2.1. And in 66 countries, including Canada, the number is now closer to one than to two. The obvious explanation for these falling rates is economic. Children are expensive and require a lot of work, which can make things difficult if you don't have a sufficient amount of money and/or time. This is why there's a strong inverse correlation between birth rates in the developed world and the developing world. Generally speaking, as a country develops, its birth rate drops. One very specific reason for this appears to be the cost of housing. Indeed, studies have found causal links between rising housing costs and declining fertility rates. And this could be one of the reasons why there's often a spread between what women report as being their ideal number of children and the actual number they have. Perhaps they wanted more, but they didn't have that extra bedroom in the home.On top of all this, there's a growing realization that there's another powerful force at work here: social media. Young people are increasingly spending their free time on their phones, forgoing in-person social gatherings and therefore missing out on opportunities to find people who would like to have sex with them. A compelling dataset for this hypothesis is the fact that while the number of children per mother seems to have stabilized in many countries, the overarching problem is that fewer women are becoming mothers in the first place.Another dimension to social media is that it distorts our perception of the world. In the same FT article, demographer Lyman Stone is quoted as saying: "If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.”The world is increasingly viewing social media as this generation's smoking. However, it's unreasonable to think that smartphones and social media will ever go away. If you're trying to market anything today, that's where the eyeballs are. But I do think all of this only strengthens the case for us to build more walkable, urban, and inclusive neighbourhoods; cities where it's possible to walk to a corner store and bump into a neighbour along the way. Not only is human interaction nice, but it has been shown to increase social trust within communities. In my view, car-oriented communities and self-driving cars that people will sit in for hours only exacerbate the problems of loneliness and social isolation. Cities are ultimately markets. They are labour markets and, yes, they are dating markets. The best cities reduce the friction around people doing business, trading goods and services, having fun, and meeting people. And it sounds like we could use more of that, not less, right now.Cover photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash Charts by John Burn-Murdoch via the Financial Times

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