Seeing other people's babies is what actually makes your brain want one.
April 14, 2026
Original Paper
The Empathy Channel in Fertility
SSRN · 6566703
The Takeaway
Exposure to infants activates biological "empathy channels" that increase the desire for parenthood. This suggests falling birth rates are a self-perpetuating cycle: the fewer babies we see in public, the less our biology prompts us to have our own.
From the abstract
Being around babies makes people want babies. We formalize this observation as the empathy channel: exposure to infants in the social environment activates neurobiological mechanisms that increase the desire for parenthood. As children become scarcer, this affective stimulus weakens, further eroding the motivation to have children. We embed the mechanism in a two-group overlapping-generations quantity-quality model. The empathy channel generates a positive externality, since each birth raises ot