Fair Start Movement

Category: Media Critique & Fact-Checking

  • The Times on Etiquette around Childlessness: A Better Option?

    The Times on Etiquette around Childlessness: A Better Option?

    The title of Anna Goldfarb’s New York Times piece (“What to Say When People Ask Why You Aren’t Having Children,” August 8, 2017) implies that she’s embarking on an examination of the ethics of procreation. But instead, she repeats the trite mantra you’ll hear on trash television and at the grocery check-out: Family planning is only about personal fulfillment, and is a highly personal topic that should be considered off limits for discussion.

    That mantra is simply false. People forgo having children for many altruistic reasons: to protect the environment, restore biodiversity, to retain time and money in order to do public interest work, etc. All of our decisions about having kids profoundly impacts others – that’s the whole point. If we care at all about the future, then we all have a stake in family planning decisions. The topic is inherently interpersonal.

    Why would publicly thinking about our collective future be considered off limits?

    The topic is inherently interpersonal, starting – obviously – with the potential child. Rather than trying to close public forums, why not seek common ground? Specifically, why don’t we have a discussion about what future we want? Why not collectively plan an escape from our current crowded, polluted, divided, unequal, and relatively uneducated world?

    Beyond the Isolationist View

    Goldfarb’s article rides upon the isolation model of family planning. This model focuses only on what parents want in the short term, rather than on what children and society need in the medium and long term. Isolationist views break the link between vital needs and available resources, and ignore the fact that having children is the most public thing most people will ever do.

    Furthermore, the isolation model completely disregards the fact that children are born entirely vulnerable, dependent on the people around them. By focusing only on the parents’ wants, rather than the child’s needs, we have created a society where children are not guaranteed a minimum level of well-being. Arguing that having children is a private matter also eliminated the opportunity for parents to cooperate in their decision making to achieve the best outcomes for every child. Because of the lack of organized, collective action dictated by the isolationist model, the caring and thoughtful people who forgo having children don’t have as great an impact as would otherwise be possible.

    In short, the isolation view harms everyone’s future and denies many children a fair start in life – a deprivation that tends to pass down over the generations. The Fair Star model breaks that cycle.

     

     

     

  • Family Models, and Having Kids, in the New York Times

    Family Models, and Having Kids, in the New York Times

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    Yesterday the New York Times published a letter to the editor from Having Kids. The letter called for starting a public dialogue about non-coercive but effective family-planning policies that protect all of the interests at stake, including children, parents, and their communities. A few days earlier, the Times published an article titled “Finding Family, Right Next Door” that raised the issue of what we mean by the word “family.” The piece tells the story of two mothers helping to raise one another’s children, living out the common expression that it takes a village to raise a child.

    Geography brought us together when we were both young mothers. We spent days, weeks, months, years eating meals together, celebrating birthdays, helping raise each other’s children. We made enough chicken nuggets and pasta for all of the kids, and delicious meatballs and jerk chicken for us. We swept up leaves and drank wine, and borrowed Benadryl and ketchup. We took vacations together and grocery shopped for each other and put Band-Aids on whichever little daredevil had fallen off his or her skateboard. We welcomed the other’s kids if one of us had to work, or had to take care of an aging parent, and during those times the kids never felt like guests, they felt like they were home. Being there, actually being there in physical proximity to each other meant something, something significant.

    . . .

    As young mothers, each with two kids, we both knew that our traditional support networks were vital, if not indispensable — spouses, helpful grandparents, lifelong girlfriends. And these mattered, of course. But husbands weren’t always available, grandparents became sick or lived too far away, and lifelong girlfriends, well, they had their own lives with their own families. So luckily, we found our lifelines in our next-door family.

    How does this story—which really tells the story of breaking down the archaic vision and norm of families isolated in their private homes holding fast against the world—relate to the Having Kids model? The model takes it one step back from families raising their children together to families planning their children together, cooperating to ensure their children enter the world in the best conditions possible.

    If it takes it takes a village to raise a child, it will take a village to plan for one.

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  • NPR Almost Gets it Right on Helping Kids Succeed

    NPR Almost Gets it Right on Helping Kids Succeed

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    “’Helping Children Succeed’ Starts At Birth; A Case For The Power Of Nurture” is a compelling review of Paul Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed. The article makes two points very clear:

    1. The environments in which children live and develop can both diminish and enhance certain noncognitive skills all children need to succeed in their lives.
    2. The diminishing and enhancing of noncognitive skills starts to happen well before children get to school, and continues in their home lives outside of school.

    Here’s a snippet:

    Let’s talk about the home environment for a minute. The ages zero to 5, and especially zero to 3, are traditionally outside the scope of education policy, and yet you spend a good deal of time talking about them. Why?

    There’s this big disconnect in how we think about education in general and this solid body of research that shows how important these early years are. We’ve known for a while that the foundations of reading and math skills, number sense, are laid in early childhood. And it’s becoming really clear that the most important foundations are on this emotional level.

    The back and forth that children and parents have, the level of fear and stress in the community, how parents manage stress and deal with it, it matters in ways we can measure very precisely at the neurobiological level. And we also know that you can change it.

    But the discussion falls short, eventually turning to and focusing on later-in-life solutions like school reform.

    And that misses the point. The most important potential change in policy starts at the source, and it involves legal, corporate, and grassroots reforms that change the way we fundamentally think about parenting and having kids. It requires getting to the point where we can finally admit that there are conditions in which no child should be born. And it requires us acknowledging that the first step to helping children starts with clear and definite models for family planning.

    In other words, helping children doesn’t start at birth. It starts well before children are born.

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  • Cosmo: Don’t Have Kids if You’re on the Fence

    Cosmo: Don’t Have Kids if You’re on the Fence

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    Kate Spencer, mother of two, offers some pretty spectacular advice: if you’re unsure about having kids, don’t.

    Kate says:

    [t]he pressure on women to nail down this mothering thing is relentless. Despite being encouraged to lean every which way, we are still told by society that only kids will make us truly #blessed, and are constantly reminded that 35 years old is considered “later in life” for having children. Not to mention, we have to do it in a country with exorbitant childcare costs and no guaranteed paid maternity leave, two factors that make the decision to have kids even more complicated. And yet, it’s as if the world is walking around with a bullhorn in our face, screaming, “Figure it out!”….

    If you are truly undecided, torn, sitting squarely on the fence not knowing what the fuck to do — don’t have kids. At least, not yet. Wait until you feel confident that these sacrifices and life changes are ones you can embrace not just because you feel like you should or because the world around you is telling you it’s time. Do it because you can’t imagine your life moving forward without them, feces and all.

    Kate’s reasoning is based on the traditional one-sided model, where the decision to have kids is based on how it will affect the parent. But if we consider it from a Having Kids model perspective, where the would-be child and parents’ community become part of the thinking, then Kate’s advice to hold off becomes more urgent. What will the child’s life be like? How will they interact with the community? Is there a way to work with other parents to assure the best outcome for all?

    Know before you jump, and don’t do it alone. 

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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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