Author: Fair Start Movement

Those who grew up in the Great Depression, fought in World War Two, and built the post-war economy are often called the Greatest Generation because of their response to the threats of their day. Today, climate change is widely considered to pose the greatest threat to human wellbeing. Could millennials become an even greater generation by their response to the threat of climate change?

The good news is that millennials are already on their way to doing just that by engaging in the most effective climate change mitigation strategy available: having smaller families. Yes, there are other approaches: By adopting available “eco-friendly” actions, including meticulous recycling, an American couple could curb their lifetime carbon footprint by 486 tons. But by simply by having one fewer child, an American woman would reduce her “carbon legacy” (the summed emissions of herself and her descendants weighted by relatedness) by 9,441 tons.

Millennials are nevertheless being pushed from all corners to have more kids. Dangerous political and religious factions in Washington are limiting access to reproductive health services. Celebrities model and promote large biological families, even when it risks their health. And even our public discourse pushes women to have kids in order to drive economic growth.

Millennials can still become the greatest generation. They just need to ignore the voices that don’t care about climate change and our world’s environment. Instead, they need to continue embracing the smaller family ethic.

Millennials are delaying having kids, often because they simply can’t afford them. At the same time, wealthy elites—from Donald Trump to Kim Kardashian—are having larger families, granting each of their children enormous privileges that will give them significant advantages in life. 

Is it fair that these children start life at a tremendous advantage, while other children lack even basic necessities such as nutritious food, a safe home, proper education, and healthcare?

In a true democracy, every child would have the fundamental right to a fair start in life. To make true democracy a reality in the world today, we need to work together to ensure that each child has the resources necessary for this fair start. Currently, there are many barriers to this fundamental fairness, from cultural norms that emphasize having kids as a “private” decision to tax and corporate policies that favor the wealthy.

Having Kids is working to dismantle these barriers by working with families, communities, and corporations to help provide better access to resources so that all children get a fair start. Join the conversation at facebook.com/havingkids.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey has called on Turkish citizens in Europe to have five children each. The goal? To create a new nationalist population boom as a means of attacking the EU from within. There is nothing new about strongmen leaders promoting larger families in order to expand state power and to subjugate women. What is interesting, though, is the absence of a backlash in response to Erdogan from human rights, child welfare, and environmental organizations, despite the detrimental impact a nationalist population boom holds for each of their missions.

Why? Under our archaic family planning systems, it would be acceptable for Turkish nationalists to have five children as a means of expanding group influence as long as the parents chose to do so, irrespective of the conditions in which the children would be born, the impact on the democracies in which they would be born, and the destruction massive families inflict on our already polluted environment. Erdogan’s call, and the lack of real outcry and backlash, shows the need to rethink family planning models. It’s wrong to have children who won’t get a fair start in life; governments and communities are obligated to help parents create that start. It’s wrong to have children without regard for how they will build or degrade the democratic communities in which we all deserve to live. It’s wrong to have so many children, or children who consume so much, so as to continue to destroy rather than restore the world’s clean, healthy, and natural environment.

Erdogan is wrong, but he is subtly buoyed up by a backward western family planning model and paradigm. It’s time for a change.

One recent spate of comments on Reddit suggests that, yes, millennials are quite thoughtful about having kids.

[M]ost of the people who participated in this discussion feel very strongly that now is not a great time to bring a child into the world. Some of the posters mentioned that at one point in their life they thought they might want to have a family, but that with the state of things, they no longer want to add to the population. Another major theme in this conversation thread was money. With so many millennials in debt with student loans and minimal wages, it’s hard for them to even fathom ever having the money to support another life beyond their own. The general sense is that everyone’s struggling and not in a position to take on more responsibility.

The article discussing the Reddit thread (quoted above) contrasts these concerns with a more carefree approach to family planning taken by prior generation and wonders which approach is best. But what the article misses—consistent with our ingrained isolationist view of having kids—is the relationship between past and present family planning.

Are millennials’ choices limited because past generations were so carefree that they had enough children to severely degrade the world’s environment? Are their choices limited because past generations ignored how family planning affects inequality and had kids in circumstances where not all children got the things they needed to be happy in life?

Did past generations’ abuse of their right to have children limit our rights to have children?

Dozens of stories have emerged in the past year or so about parents breaking an age-old taboo by publicly admitting they regret having children. From heart-wrenching personal stories of overwhelming remorse to tales from a wide socioeconomic spectrum of families to exploding Facebook pages and reactionary criticism from conservatives, parents are starting to speak out.

What does parental regret have to do with family planning models? Today, the universal (and virtually unquestioned) model for family planning focuses exclusively on the parents’ subjective preferences. It offers little or no guidance as to what the best decision would actually be, and it isolates parents as they do their best to care for the children they do have. Is it then a surprise that parents come to regret having kids? Perhaps because they had them so early on in life, or without enough savings, or because they had more kids than they could adequately parent? It shouldn’t be surprising.

We have to do better than treating the biggest decision most people will ever make—for themselves, for others, and for the planet—as something guided merely by parents’ intuition and whim, as if parents were shopping in a store for a simple household product.

The Having Kids model breaks this isolating and outdated paradigm by using universally shared values to guide would-be parents. The model urges them to wait to have children until they can provide the things all children deserve, to demand help from the community in obtaining those things, and to not have more children than they—as well as their community and the planet—can nurture, sustain, and help thrive.

It’s great that parents are speaking out about regret. Let’s rethink family planning so that, in the future, they might not have to.