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Today’s college students probably don’t remember, but when the iPhone first rolled out in 2007, some technology analysts thought it would fail. “There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive,” wrote a MarketWatch columnist. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was even more emphatic: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Well, they were wrong, in more ways than one. The iPhone not only became the most popular smartphone in the world, but also helped accelerate the digital transformation of society. The iPhone, and the slew of competitors that followed it, undeniably changed the way we communicate, consume media, and interact with each other. As a new research paper suggests, it also changed the nature and method of how we form relationships and families as well.

Observers and commentators have been speculating that smartphones have been affecting marriage and fertility decisions for over a decade now. The argument goes something like this: How can the phones not have had an impact? Staying at home to binge-watch a show has gotten easier and more enjoyable than when the alternative was reading a novel or schlepping down to the bar. Finding an image or video for sexual gratification has gotten easier than when the nearest X-rated movie was kept behind the counter at the video store. Every airport terminal, cocktail reception, or subway ride — places where we used to mix, mingle, and maybe even meet-cute — is relatively more boring compared to the feeds, podcasts, and videos burning a hole in your pocket.

In other words, it’s less about the devices themselves than the entertainment and communications alternatives they enable. That’s been the supposition, and now those of us who said smartphones and digital media have changed something fundamental about youth and young adulthood in the 21st century have new empirical grounding for this belief.

The strength of the new working paper comes from another oft-forgotten detail about the iPhone’s rollout: For the first few years after Apple introduced the new device, you could only get it on the AT&T network. By comparing counties that had AT&T mobile broadband access in the time the iPhone was being rolled out to those that didn’t, researchers Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper of Middlebury College were able to estimate what increasing iPhone access did to birth rates.

Taken at face value, their results suggest a meaningful, measurable impact of smartphone access on birth rates. In particular, they find particularly large impacts on young women in their teens and early 20s who lived in areas that were early adopters of AT&T broadband coverage (birth rates among older women were more steady.) If their point estimates are correct, this difference could explain as much as one-third of the decline in fertility over the past two decades. As Myers and Hooper sum up, “the iPhone, and the smartphone era it inaugurated, materially accelerated the post-2007 U.S. fertility decline.”

None of this is to say that this paper can be taken as gospel. The rollout of 3G broadband service, for example, could be correlated in an unseen way with characteristics that were driving down fertility. (Imagine if the urban neighborhoods that were more likely to be selected for 3G access were also more likely to have young women who were disproportionately likely to turn against motherhood after the Great Recession.) The iPhones in 2007 were far less addictive and immersive than the modern-day versions, with users more likely to be checking e-mail and painstakingly logging into MySpace than getting notifications of new likes and comments. The introduction of the iPhone also coincided with a year of tremendous economic tumult and the near-collapse of the global financial system.

The researchers try to account for these differences as best they can, by re-weighting the data to account for differences in observable characteristics, but differences that can’t be identified by reviewers (such as cultural norms, local attitudes toward marriage, and other intangibles) could still be causing the paper to look stronger than it is.

Then again, no one research paper will ever be the definitive last word. And what this new work does is give us more evidence (as if more was needed) that the digital revolution is upending the way we interact as humans, something Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas explicitly addresses. The specific technology itself is almost immaterial; if Steve Ballmer had been right, and the iPhone had flopped, the introduction of social media, short-form video, and always-on communication, information, pornography, and entertainment on whatever device would have still had an impact on our dating and mating culture.

At this point, anyone who is arguing that phones didn’t change societal scripts in a meaningful way has the burden of proof. We can feel it in small ways, even if we don’t like it — like Ben Lichtenstein, a 24-year-old interviewed by New York Times magazine earlier this year. “I’ve noticed that I can’t so much as wait for the elevator without scrolling through TikTok,” he said. “It’s the best distraction. It makes the time pass. But more and more, I’m like: Why do we want the time to pass?”

We need to try to build tools, habits, and norms that reclaim not just the time in the elevator lobby, but the institutions, rituals, and phone-free meet-ups that used to help couples hit it off. If we don’t address the impact of digital tech on our family formation decisions, the consequences could be dire.

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Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he writes on pro-family policy and publishes the Substack newsletter Family Matters.

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