A study by the University of Helsinki claims women who extensively use social media or are very work-orientated often postpone having children as they do not want them to affect their lifestyle.

While it had been before claimed the spread of social media was a cause of sinking fertility rates, this is the first time the link has been proven, researchers say.

Researchers at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki conducted the study to find out why the Finnish birth rate has substantially dropped from 1.87 children per woman in 2010 to just 1.35 children per woman as of 2019.

The study found three main reasons cited by women as to why they were not having children, including uncertainty of their life situation, wanting to maintain a certain lifestyle and believing there were already enough children in the country.

“Some adults did not want to change their current way of life, preferring to do other things in life rather than start a family,” researcher Kateryna Golovina said.

The study also revealed that women who extensively use social media and were more work-orientated were far more likely to not have children compared to those who rarely use social media and those using social media often were likely to cite lifestyle as their reason for not having children.

“It has been speculated in public that the spread of social media in the 2010s would be linked to the decline in the birth rate. Here, we show for the first time with survey data that there is a connection,” Anna Rotkirch, Research Director at the Family Federation of Finland, said.

Finland is not the only country in the European Union to see plummeting both rates as countries like Italy and Spain saw low birth rates during the coronavirus pandemic, with Spain seeing just 1.19 births per woman in 2020, while Italy saw 1.17 births per woman among Italians citizens and 1.24 births per women for all residents of the country.

In France, which has one of the highest birth rates in the European Union, around a third of women of childbearing age stated that they never wished to have children in their lifetimes, citing various reasons including climate change.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.