Fair Start Movement

Category: News & Fair Start Headlines

  • 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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  • 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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  • Leo’s Leap of Faith

    Leo’s Leap of Faith

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    Leonardo DiCaprio captured headlines again with a vague hint for adoring fans eager to know about his plans to have children: “Do you mean do I want to bring children into a world like this?” asked the 41-year-old actor. “If it happens, it happens. I’d prefer not to get into specifics about it, just because then it becomes something that is misquoted. But, yeah.”

    Here’s what’s interesting about the statement. Leo seems concerned about the world his children would inherit—and rightly so. But he seems to disconnect that concern, as most people do, from the act of having those children. The fact is, our future world will look and be like the people born and raised today—the children we have. And we can make that future bright by working together to make those children the best they can be. Leo disconnects the two issues because under the current isolation model of parenting, Leo has no control over the future his children will inherit; in our current model, parents go off to private enclaves to make these decisions. But we can break that model and make the future safe for our children. Things like the Having Kids model—where everyone works together to have fewer children and invest more in each child—offer a better alternative.

    By working together, we don’t have to make a leap of faith. Together, we can shape our future.

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  • See World Population Growth Over Centuries

    See World Population Growth Over Centuries

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    An impressive GIF shows what world population looked like in 1800, 1900, and 2000, as well as what the United Nations projects for 2100. Here’s what Vox had to say about this population growth:

    Between 1900 and 2000, the size of the global population skyrocketed (from 1.7 to 6.1 billion), mostly in the developing world — Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. This reflects huge victories in global development and the spread of economic growth and technology previously reserved for Europe and North America. Once again, this has geopolitical significance: Being larger and richer gives countries more resources to draw on in international politics. We’re talking about the rise of countries like China and India today for a reason.

    Being larger and richer may seem like a benefit to nations, but what about the people actually living in them? A basic principle of international development called the demographic dividend suggests that smaller families, not growth, promote development.

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  • Family Planning Dynamics & the Having Kids Model

    Family Planning Dynamics & the Having Kids Model

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    The story of families in Tanzania provides a great example of how family planning efforts — if fully funded — could protect women, children, and the environment all at the same time.

    Tanzania is a large country; it’s about the size of Texas and Colorado combined. Tanzania’s population is quite young: as of 2014, 45% of the population was under the age of 15. It’s the 6th most populated country in Africa, with 52.3 million people. By 2030—only 15 years from now—the population is projected to rise to 79.4 million, and by 2050, unless the birth rate slows substantially, there will be 2.5 times as many people in Tanzania as there are today, 129.4 million, which would make it the 15th largest country in the world.

    What is driving the rapid population increase? Only 26% of married women use modern contraception, compared with 53% next door in Kenya. In the Kigoma region of western Tanzania, the rate falls to 14%, among the lowest in the world. Forty one percent of women in Kigoma have an unmet need for contraception. The total fertility rate in western Tanzania is 7.1, among the very highest in the world. Having babies in rapid succession is often accompanied by high maternal mortality. There is an urgent need to make voluntary contraception more available in places like rural western Tanzania so that women and their families are able to live healthier, productive lives and space and plan their families.

    How can we strengthen demands for increased funding of contraception beyond the plea to simply make it “accessible?” Perhaps it’s time to embrace an objective and universal model of smaller families working together to invest more in each child, rather than traditional and subjective models that do not address family size, community involvement, and minimum standards of wellbeing and equality for future children.

    It’s not just countries like Tanzania that need this change — all of our futures depend on it.

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  • Growth and the Quantity-Quality Trade-off

    Growth and the Quantity-Quality Trade-off

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    A recent study suggests that with every additional child, other siblings are more likely to suffer from lower cognitive abilities, more behavioral issues, and worse outcomes later in life. This research builds on prior evidence that there is a significant trade-off between quantity and quality when it comes to family size. The “quantity-quality” trade-off, as it has been called, can have dramatic impacts throughout a child’s life, such as less education, lower earnings, and increased risk for teenage pregnancies and criminal behavior. If this is true, why are some leaders still pushing for larger families? Maybe it’s time to revisit growth policies that are designed to make infinitely “stronger” economies and nations at real costs to the people actually living in them.
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  • Switching Off Sperm: the Future of Male Contraception?

    Switching Off Sperm: the Future of Male Contraception?

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    Research is underway on a new device that would allow men to control their fertility by literally flicking a switch. Given that a recent study confirmed that a whopping forty percent of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned, this kind of male contraception could have a dramatic impact. Besides affecting parental and child wellbeing, it would have long-reaching effects on the health of our environment. What might the world have looked like today if something as simple as a “switch” had been available decades ago?

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