Fair Start Movement

Author: Fair Start Movement

  • Kim Kardashian: Having Two Kids Is Like Having Twenty

    Kim Kardashian: Having Two Kids Is Like Having Twenty

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    Kim Kardashian recently took to her blog to reveal what having two kids is really like.

    “My mom would always say, about having kids: ‘One is like one, and two are like twenty.’ I never really understood that until now.” 

    It’s not just the demands of a newborn that are keeping Kim up at night. “Every waking second that I’m not with the baby, I’m with North,” she adds of her two-year-old daughter North. “I actually think the harder parts aren’t with the newborn but with the toddler! I feel like I go into overdrive to give my daughter attention and make her feel loved.”

    All parents want to give their children the love and attention they need to grow into happy, successful adults. The Having Kids model can help ensure that all parents have the resources to do that.

     

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  • Singapore is Working Against Itself

    Singapore is Working Against Itself

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    Like many other countries at the Paris climate negotiations last year, Singapore promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Although some experts criticized those promises as insufficient, others say they are unrealistic. Singapore’s Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifl called the plan “very aggressive, very ambitious.” Singapore’s goal is to hit an emissions peak by 2030.

    “This is a huge challenge because we still need to have an economy that will support our people’s livelihood and at the same time, not produce even more emissions for that purpose,” Zulkifi said.

    But even while Singapore struggles to lower its emissions, it’s also working to increase emissions by increasing family size as it addresses what it calls a national baby shortage. What’s an alternative? Instead of pushing for larger families and working against its own climate plan and an obvious social trend towards smaller families, Singapore could be designing its family modeling around families working together to make better investments in each child. The Having Kids model can help.

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  • Erica Gies Is Not Having Kids

    Erica Gies Is Not Having Kids

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    Erica Gies writes passionately and persuasively about her decision not to have children for ethical reasons. Erica explains:  

    In his classic treatise ‘On Liberty,’ John Stuart Mill argued that your right to do what you want ends at the point at which it infringes on someone else’s rights. I’d argue that, given our extreme population, having more than two kids, the replacement level for a couple, is impinging upon other people’s liberty by using their share of resources. Still, government incentives are skewed, offering tax credits for reproduction, thereby penalizing people without kids. That needs to change.

    People without biological kids can still give to the next generation. Adoption provides desperately needed love and stability to a child who’s already here. I was adopted, as were two of my nephews. And in recent years, I have become a stepmother to two smart, warm, fun kids. It’s a role both enlightening and challenging, pushing me to grow as I strive to be a positive influence in their lives.

    When I consider their future and the healthy planet they need to thrive, I hope that we will continue to move toward greater social acceptance of being childfree, better government policies, and more widespread education for women as a soft path to reducing our numbers. For optimal quality of life, we need fewer of us.

    But is it enough for people like Erica to individually consider the ethics of having kids and to take action? Or to have a real impact do we have to do it all together, collectively, as a society? 

    At Having Kids, we promote a model for parenting that addresses these questions collectively to be as fair and effective as possible.

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  • Zika: Why Aren’t We Prepared?

    Zika: Why Aren’t We Prepared?

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    As the Zika virus spreads and thousands of severely disabled children continue to be born, many are asking why the world is not better prepared. Last week, in a letter published in the New York Times, Having Kids suggested one answer. Traditional models of parenting that isolate parents and treat the act of having kids as an entirely personal matter push directly against society collectively deciding when and in what conditions to bring children into the world. These models have left us unable to help women avoid pregnancies, even in the face of a crisis we should easily be able to avoid. How is it possible that we cannot work together to collectively decide, as a global community, to delay pregnancy in the face of a future generation that will suffer for our inaction? The truth is that collective decision-making about having kids is something the world hasn’t done well – and now, when we really need to do it, we are unable.

    What’s the solution? Having Kids moves us from a model that says “you can’t talk about this” to one that asks how we can work together to solve problems. It’s the model that should have been in place before the Zika epidemic. It’s the model that would have helped us face this crisis as a united community, making decisions about the well-being of our future children together. By promoting smaller families working together to invest more in each child, our model focuses on bringing children into the world with a minimum level of well-being and equal opportunities in life. And it doesn’t just help people: It helps heal nature and our ailing democracies. Let’s start to face Zika by changing the way the world thinks about having kids. 

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  • Large Families, Explosive Growth

    Large Families, Explosive Growth

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    “It’s a small world.”

    A video on population growth from worldpopulationhistory.org gives the old expression new meaning. Here are the facts:

    • In just about 200 years, the global population exploded from roughly 900 million people to more than 7.3 billion.
    • We are headed towards roughly 10 billion.

    But this trend of explosive growth is changing. Parents are choosing smaller families, and they’re investing more in each child. We can accelerate that trend, improve children’s well-being and equality of opportunity, and restore our environment and democracies, simply by working together.

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  • Having Kids in the New York Times: The Zika Virus and Family Planning

    Having Kids in the New York Times: The Zika Virus and Family Planning

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    Piper Hoffman, Having Kids’ executive director, has a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times on the Zika virus and family planning. Hoffman writes in response to a NYT article about El Salvador health officials advising women not to get pregnant until 2018 to avoid infant brain damage caused by the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Here’s her letter in its entirety:

    One theme is clear in “El Salvador’s Advice on Zika Virus: Don’t Have Babies” (front page, Jan. 26). El Salvador’s advice that women should abstain from pregnancy for two years to avoid having children born with microcephaly, a rare condition in which babies have unusually small heads, is shocking.

    But isn’t it more shocking to feel compelled to have children in the face of a growing mosquito-borne epidemic likely to cause them severe brain damage? The surprise in your article stems from historical parenting models that discourage parents from working together to maximize the well-being of future generations by deciding when and how to bring them into this world.

    If we care about children, we’ll move away from these models. Supporting El Salvador’s move to work collectively to avoid severe brain damage in children would be a start.

    This is what Having Kids is all about: thinking critically about how and when to have children and how to best support the children we do have. El Salvador’s family planning approach moves from a one-sided perspective on parenting (based solely on parental desire) to a three-sided perspective that also includes the future child’s wellbeing and the family’s impact on others. The outraged reaction among rights groups over what was advice from the government, not a mandate, highlights just how ingrained the traditional parenting model is.

    We can change that.

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  • 62 Billionaires vs. Half the World

    62 Billionaires vs. Half the World

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    Almost all modern political systems share at least one guiding principle: that the people within them should be born free and equal. Ensuring that  equality — a fair start for all people — is required to legitimize those systems.

    So, how are our political systems doing these days, in terms of their legitimacy?

    Not very well. Oxfam drew much attention last week with a report calculating that the 62 richest billionaires in the world own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population. If we extrapolate that report to children and consider the vastly different opportunities children have in life, with some children mining the cobalt for other children’s smartphones, its unclear where the fair start that legitimizes our political systems actually exists.

    What’s the solution? Oxfam was right to call for more aggressive tax enforcement and investment in public services. But they missed perhaps the most compelling rationale for that enforcement and plan for that investment: Giving every child a fair start in life. The Having Kids model can help.

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  • What Does Having Kids Mean by Improved Continuity?

    What Does Having Kids Mean by Improved Continuity?

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    Q: Having Kids refers to improved continuity as the objective value at the heart of the Having Kids model. What does that mean?

    A: One of the problems with current parenting models is that they provide no objective value on which to base the decision to have a child. As such, they don’t provide common ground for parents to work together, collectively, to make the best parenting decisions possible.  The Having Kids model starts with the most basic human value—the desire for our lives to continue and improve, i.e. improved continuity—and applies it to parenting.

    With improved continuity at the core of our decision-making, the reasons we have children change. Following traditional parenting models, parents might validate their decision to have four children by saying that they “value the feeling of a large family” or they “want a child of a certain gender.” With improved continuity at the core, parents will invest more in their first and/or second child to make those children’s lives better than their own lives. And it encourages parents to invest in the first and/or second child of parents in need to help them achieve improved continuity for their own children.

    Doing so would improve all children’s lives, give them common ground, and help them eventually work together to shape the best future possible. It would also fulfill what matters most—objectively—to parents: the continuation and improvement of their lives through their children. Improved continuity: It’s part of the Having Kids model of smaller families working together to invest more in each child.

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  • The Oceans Our Kids Will Play In: Hot, Acidic, and Empty?

    The Oceans Our Kids Will Play In: Hot, Acidic, and Empty?

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    We hear a lot about rising temperatures over land as our planet’s atmosphere continues to degrade, in large part thanks to a population headed towards ten billion people by 2050. But the fact is that our oceans are in many ways ground zero for climate change. They’ve continued to warm and become more acidic after absorbing much of the heat and carbon dioxide caused by human growth. New studies also show that, while the oceans themselves are changing, the fishing industry worldwide is decimating whole fisheries to feed the world’s growing population. Yet in the face of all of this change, some are pushing for even larger families and even more consumption:

    The UN population division’s latest work on low-fertility and aging is eye popping and is meant to inform policy makers about their options. It includes ominous predictions about economic and social ills and shows how the crisis is most acute in countries that are poorest. “Population aging must be understood and addressed by all countries,” John Wilmoth, the lead demographer at the UN Population Division, said at a gathering at UN headquarters in November.

    At Having Kids we value our oceans, nature, and a safe, clean, and healthy future for children over the unsustainable and population-fueled economic growth that has lead us where we are today. It’s time to move towards a better model of parenting and to stand against those whose greed threatens our oceans, our children, and our future.

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