Fair Start Movement

Category: News & Fair Start Headlines

A Holistic Approach to Having Kids

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In St. Louis, Missouri, pediatricians are taking a holistic approach to having kids. They’re starting to ask parents about their financial situation and whether they live in poverty. If parents do live in poverty, they’re provided with services that increase the child’s quality of life today while saving money on health costs in the future. Doctors are trying to be proactive to help improve everyone’s quality of life.

Collectively, we need to come together to provide resources to those who don’t have them so that we can improve the quality of life of individuals and the communities that we live in. Having Kids provides families with sex education and family planning, encouraging everyone to have smaller families so we can dedicate more resources to each child. By providing resources to families to support family planning decisions and their children, we can raise the bar for all.

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May 4, 2016
New York Leads the Way on Paid Leave

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New York is leading the nation in many ways when it comes to providing families with methods to help support future children and families. Recently, the state announced its #LeadOnLeave initiative, which will give both men and women three months of paid leave. The program is funded by employees, for employees so that the cost will not fall on the employer. This will give new parents the opportunity to be with their child for the first three months, while the current standard is 0 weeks paid leave.

According to CNN, “The majority of the research surrounding paid leave shows definite benefits to the baby, mother and family, including a decline in infant and maternal mortality, an increase in breast-feeding rates and more involvement by fathers in their children’s lives and in child care activities.” #LeadOnLeave will provide more resources to each child so they can live a higher quality of life overall.

The state has also been at the forefront of combating the Zika Virus to limit potential cases of microcephaly. New York has been providing free testing to individuals who have traveled to countries where the disease is prevalent. By being proactive, the state is ensuring that families can respond to this outbreak effectively and that they can plan when to have children so those future children won’t be affected by the virus.

Because New Yorkers are working together to create resources for families, New York is providing conditions for a high quality of life for the children of the future. New York is thinking critically about having kids and about the future it wants to create for those children. Other communities and states should #LeadOnLeave and provide resources to families for testing for diseases like Zika.

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May 2, 2016
Family Planning in Indonesia: A Model for the World
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Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) announced that he will revive Indonesia’s family planning program, which previous presidents have not prioritized. President Jokowi sees this as a strategic investment that will:

Help families save more overall

Provide parents access to higher incomes

Reduce maternal and child mortality

Reduce poverty

Provide more opportunities, such as education and employment, for the children who are born under these policies

Having Kids believes that policies like these should be implemented around the world. In doing so, we could ensure that children being born into this world are given a high quality of life and are born into conditions in which they can thrive. If families cannot plan when they have kids, society and families alike to often find it challenging to devote the amount of resources necessary to each child to ensure their success. Addressing these issues now can provide a sound future for children who have not yet been born. The Having Kids model can ensure this sound future by helping families invest more resources in each child.
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April 5, 2016
The Benefits of Small Families

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A recent article detailed many obvious and irrefutable benefits to having fewer kids: parents who are able to spend more time with each child, less competition for resources among children, more free time for parents, savings of close to a quarter of a million dollars per child (the average cost of raising a child in the United States), and children who are statistically likely to become more independent. Curiously, though, the article concludes like this: “Remember, the argument about one child vs. many children all boils down to personal priorities and preferences.”

But is that true? Shouldn’t it matter to all of us whether the world is overcrowded, whether the environment is degraded, and whether parents are investing enough in each child to help them lead good lives and get along with others? At Having Kids, we believe that parenting decisions are more than personal and that we can work together to create a better world.

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February 29, 2016
Australia’s “Close the Gap” Program Can Do Better

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There is a massive gap between indigenous and non-indigenous communities in Australia when it comes to things like healthcare, education, and employment. (These graphics from The Economist demonstrate the disparity visually.) And despite years of policies designed to close the gap, a recent study shows there has been little progress. Why not?

Gap-closing initiatives often ignore the disproportionate influence that early childhood has on quality of health, well-being, learning, and behavior across a child’s life. The Having Kids model increases the focus on early childhood by redirecting the resources being used to create larger families towards improving the birth conditions of each child. By working together, we can close the gap for good.

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February 24, 2016
Can Sub-Replacement Fertility Work? Just Ask Japan.

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Japan now has a “birthrate czar,” Katsunobu Kato, who is tasked with urging women to become pregnant to stabilize Japan’s population at about 100 million as it falls from a current ~125 million. In 2015, Kato oversaw about 32 billion dollars of public funding to stabilize the birthrate at a sub-replacement level of 1.8 children per woman, using a variety of interventions. According to Kato, the government envisions a less populous Japan, but one where “all Japanese people and people of all ages and sexes–including those who have failed… can dream and hope to create a society heading forward.”

Some are asking why Japan is investing so much in creating additional people rather than investing in the children and adults that are there now. When pressed, Kato cited economic growth rates as the reason for massive investment. But are there values other than economic growth rates that should also be considered? What about restoring the nonhuman world, investing more individualized attention in each child, and creating communities small enough and with enough in common for people to feel connected to one another? That sounds good to us.

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February 23, 2016
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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February 22, 2016
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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February 19, 2016
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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February 4, 2016