Ferility rates may be declining, but you wouldn't know it browsing YouTube.
Every day, dozens of influencers and creators post videos to the platform announcing their happy news: "We're pregnant!" Some will shoot to the top of YouTube's trending chart, garnering hundreds of thousands of views, often in a matter of hours.
Among the most popular clips, mommies-to-be read off their results fresh off the test stick. Others capture the reactions of the father or family and friends. There are creators unveiling their pregnancies to their followers, who respond with their congratulations in the comments. There's even a cottage industry for those who might be figuring out how to announce their own bundles of joy to the world.
A Global Baby Bust
Online, it can seem like babies are booming. In reality, birth rates in the U.S. are steadily decreasing. Between 2007 and 2022, the nationwide birth rate fell by nearly 23 percent, according to data from the Centers of Diseases and Control Prevention (CDC). In 2023, it dropped another 3 percent.
There is no consensus on what factors, exactly, are driving the trend, which is not exclusive to the U.S. and is in fact being replicated across much of the developed world.
Sociologists have been perplexed at the scale and stubbornness of the decline in fertility, which does not appear to be materially impacted by various governments' attempts to intervene with supposedly birth-inducing policies like tax credits.
To some, though, the answer is quite literally staring people right in the face.
"Social media may be playing a role in pushing the birth rate down, in part by promoting the perception that people should really only have children if they can give those children what we might think of as 'Pinterest-perfect' lives," Jessica Calarco, an award-winning sociology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek.
Through YouTube vlogs, Facebook mom groups, social posts from mom-fluencers and group texts with friends, women often face pressure "not only to be a good mom, but to be a sort of social media version of a glossy-perfection kind of mom," Calarco said.
The popularity of YouTube pregnancy announcements may also help foster an environment that's friendlier to the growing number of women who are waiting longer to have kids. While women were, on average, around the age of 21 when they had their first baby in 1970, that national average is now closer to 27, according to federal data published in 2022.
There are many factors that contribute to the demographic shift, with finances and child care being among the top concerns, according to surveys. But the rise of social media and the influencer economy may also be creating conditions that alleviate pressure on women to start motherhood sooner.
"The tone of content can be a way for people to live vicariously through others and test out the idea of what might it be like to have a child myself or what might it be like to think about that possibility, even if it's not something I think for myself," Calarco said.
Jessica Grose, an opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of the book Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood, agreed: "There is a portion of the social media audience that can live vicariously through influencers."
"I just had a conversation with a younger friend who doesn't have kids about why she finds [the influencer] Ballerina Farm so appealing," Grose told Newsweek. "The images are so beautiful and little kids are so cute — especially if you are removed from the day-to-day, messy reality of caring for them."
Hannah Neeleman, the influencer behind Ballerina Farm, has amassed 10.1 million followers on Instagram and another 9.8 million on TikTok for her homemaking and family content. Neeleman, who is the mother of eight children, garnered controversy last year after The Sunday Times wrote an in-depth profile chronicling her daily life, which led some to criticize her husband's role in their traditional family dynamic.
Creators like Neeleman appear to have cracked a social-media code with their baby and home-life content, acting as a beacon of tranquility in an otherwise rage-inducing social feed.
"It is often beautiful, joyful and calming!" Grose said. "That's not how I would describe most social media in the year 2025."
Parasocial Relationships
The popularity of such content is part of a larger social phenomenon that extends beyond the confines of a digital screen. Neha Ruch, the founder of Mothers United, observed it playing out while on a tour for her new book, The Power Pause: How to Plan A Career Break After Kids—And Come Back.
"There's the one woman there without kids who just wants to know her options and to know that there are options available," Ruch told Newsweek. "When women are in that window of being newly-partnered or aging into a moment of wanting children, they are seeking any and all assurance that there are options, there is community, there is a way to make this work."
"It's an interesting brain trust, but it starts with letting people in on the journey," she said.
Social media opens up the possibilities for with whom those journeys are shared. A milestone that might have once been reserved for close friends and family can now effectively be beamed out — and monetized — for anyone who wants to experience it.
"Parasocial relationships have long existed between members of the public and media figures, and social media certainly amplifies those parasocial relationships," Calarco said of the one-sided relationships that have become normalized with the rise of YouTube vloggers and influencers.
Celebrity Pregnancies
In the same way that Demi Moore made pregnancy photoshoots fashionable with her iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover, newer generations of expectant mothers have had their own celebrity trendsetters. Five years ago, after disappearing from social media for months, Kylie Jenner announced to the world that she had given birth with a video titled, "To Our Daughter." The clip served, in a way, as the birth of the modern public pregnancy announcement.
Within 24 hours of being uploaded, Jenner's video garnered more than 20 million views. A screenshot, in which Jenner can be seen rubbing her belly while saying, "next thing I knew, I was pregnant," became a viral meme. Today, her YouTube announcement has nearly 108 million views. It is Jenner's most watched video of all-time.
"When a celebrity participates, it almost valorizes it, like, 'This is a legitimate thing to do because celebrities do it,'" Kathryn Jezer-Morton, the author of The Cut's popular modern family column "Brooding," told Newsweek.
"The connection and personal investments that people have in the lives of others who they're only distantly connected with is partly because we do get to see those," Calarco added.
"When we see moments of celebration happening—whether it's people doing the waves at a sporting event or people liking a popular social media post about something that's fun and exciting—it feels good to be part of that group, to be part of that excitement, to have feel as though you are connected to other people who are celebrating."
YouTube pregnancy announcements fit right at the intersection of all those very human experiences.
"[These announcements] can check sweet spots, of being easily likable, of being things that aren't controversial to like or to get excited about with," Calarco said.
Fighting for Eyeballs
It also just helps that people love to watch babies.
"Baby, pregnancy and newborn content is super, super successful. It gets super high engagement, and your engagement will fall off as your kids get older," Jezer-Morton said.
"If you're a professional influencer, it's an extremely valuable time in your life. You really have to milk it for all it's worth, because you're going to gain new followers and you want to hook them and keep them engaged. A lot of them are going to leave after the kid gets to be 3 years old," she added.
Which is why, for Jezer-Morton, these announcements are really about spectacle.
"It's just an opportunity to make a splash," she said.
"We are a moment where everyday people are kind of put into competition with brands for the attention of their networks, Our friends' feeds are really, really packed. If we want people to see anything about us, we are trying to make it eye-catching, in a way that we probably weren't 10 years ago when we didn't have to fight so hard for attention."
She argued the allure of pregnancy announcements are downstream of another popular form of social-media baby content: gender reveals. She pushed back on the criticism often aimed at those viral videos, saying it was misplaced because people who post gender reveals care more about doing "something visually fun on social media" than the gender binary.
In some ways, the countless pregnancy videos that are uploaded to YouTube each week aren't reflecting national fertility rates simply because they're not designed to.
"Generally speaking, family content is made with other families in mind," Jezer-Morton said. "Creators usually speak to their own people. It's this feeling of 'This is us. We all share these things in common and that's why we're a community.'"
"Social media is one way women try and build support around themselves, and pregnancy sharing is one part of that," said Ruch, the Mothers United founder. "It's this idea that as they step into this new milestone, they want their communities to know they're going through this transition and to be able to rally around them in some way."
Calarco stressed the pressure that new mothers contend with, and how it has been exacerbated by social media.
"We tell parents that you're supposed to have this choice, but that means that mothers often have to figure it out for themselves, and these kinds of online spaces can be a space that feels full of conflicting information, and even full of judgements, if you feel like you didn't make the right choice."
Making Parenthood Affordable Again
In the end, while social media may play a part in people's decisions to delay motherhood, "their lived realities are a much bigger deterrent," Grose said.
"I most frequently hear from people who want kids but don't have them that they haven't met the right person, or they feel they can't afford to have children," she told Newsweek.
That speaks to the fundamental question vexing sociologists and fertility experts. Today, American women have around 1.6 children, a number well below the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children that is needed for a population to replace itself from one generation to the next.
Some countries, including the U.S., have tried to provide cash incentives for women to have more babies. Taiwan has spent more than $3 billion on child-rearing initiatives. Russia offers a one-time payment of $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary has $30,000 loans available for newlyweds who can have the debt forgiven if they have three children.
The U.S. introduced it first Child Tax Credit (CTC) in 1997 under President Bill Clinton, initially offering $400 per child. Over time that check has increased in value. Under President George Bush, it went up to $1,000. Under Barack Obama, a lowered income threshold was introduced for refundability up to $3,000. Donald Trump increased the CTC up to $2,000 per child under his first term.
As part of his pandemic relief bill known as the American Rescue Plan Act, Joe Biden brought it up to $3,600 for children under 6 and up to $3,000 for those aged 6 to 17. The credit came back down to $2,000 per child in 2022 after Congress declined to extend it.
Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas and the executive director of the Council on Contemporary Families, told Newsweek while these payments could "move the needle in a small fashion," cash assistance is not enough to get fertility rates up.
"I don't think you could pay people enough cash to outweigh the quarter of a million dollars that it currently takes to raise a child from birth to age 17 before college on a middle-class salary," she said. "So, that's the crux of the problem. Are you honestly going to create tax credit that for $27,000 a year? Probably not."
But affordability is only one part of the puzzle. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin recently published a study suggesting countries with the greatest decline in fertility are actually those that have seen the most economic growth in recent years, but still have a deeply gender-divided society.
Goldin's December paper found that rapid economic change often challenges strongly-held beliefs that do not change as swiftly as technology and economies do. That conflict, she wrote, may lead to a bigger gender divide and increasingly rapid reduction in fertility.
A better method, Glass suggested, would be to follow in the footsteps of European countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, which have strong social safety nets combined with policies designed to enable mothers to continue working during their child-rearing years. Those help enable couples to have more children because they could go on making more income to offset the rising costs of childcare.
"You probably can't get to more than two children per woman, which is what you would need for replacement fertility, but you might be able to move the needle from 1.6 to 1.8 or 1.9 and that would make a huge difference," Glass said.
"The U.S. baby boom is one of the few examples of a country with a TFR [total fertility rate] less than two that greatly increased," Goldin wrote in her report.
"The baby boom was partly accomplished by glorifying marriage, motherhood, the 'good wife,' and the home. Can a turnaround today be accomplished by glorifying parenthood, especially fatherhood, and changing workplace rules so fathers are not penalized by taking time off and requesting flexible work arrangements?"
She continued: "One thing is clear: unless the negative relationship between income and fertility is reversed, the birth rate will probably not increase."
