Now, ultraconservative lawmakers have combined with the administration of hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, who was elected last year, to criminalize the termination of pregnancies except in cases of rape, incest and risks to the mother’s life. Many officials speak of producing offspring as a moral duty, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemning those who don’t as indulging in a decadent bourgeois affectation. . . . Some of the Youthful Population office’s inducements for childbearing have invited ridicule and criticism, such as making family expansion a factor for university professors to climb up the academic ladder.
Not only will Iran’s policies exacerbate the climate crisis by multiplying the nation’s environmental impact, but they do nothing to ensure that children will be born into conditions that ensure equal opportunities in life, or that will eventually lead to the development of democratic society Iran.
And that’s the whole point.
Iran’s move is enabled by the United Nation’s family planning model, which ignores human rights and environmental sustainability – never ensuring the conditions of democratic development required by things like the Children’s Convention – and instead permits unsustainable growth that favors concentrations of wealth and power in member states.
TAKE ACTION: Urge @Atayeshe, the head the UN’s Population Fund, to condemn the policy as the first and overriding human right, the right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, the right that liberates people by limiting and decentralizing power and thereby building true democracy.
That harm is a violation of the human right to a safe and healthy and sustainable environment and flows from the decisions of people like former Exxon executive Lee Raymond to hide evidence of the emerging climate crisis, preventing policies and other efforts that could have stopped much of the harm we see unfolding today.
People like Lee, and his family, made a fortune by foisting the true costs of their money on the environment, and future generations. They hurt people, for their own benefit.
There is no greater act of justice than recovering the money people like Lee made by harming others and using it to mitigate the crises we face today in the most effective way possible – through Fair Start family planning reforms that restore nature and truly empower children though better conditions of birth and development. There is no way to effectively protect future generations, and the restored ecologies they need to thrive, without policies that improve family planning outcomes, ideally ensuring all birth occur in conditions consistent with the Children’s Convention.
There are many ways to promote a better future. Take action now.
Healthy living is more than eating vegetables and getting in a daily workout. It is a comprehensive lifestyle that nourishes minds, bodies, souls and the environment. Learn how you can encourage healthy living while avoiding common parenting missteps.
1. Don’t Make Your Kids Clean Their Plates
While a desire to not waste can be appreciated, requiring kids to eat everything on their plates teaches them to ignore natural hunger cues. Instead, try starting with smaller portions and add more as necessary. Another option is to serve meals family-style and give children agency over what and how much they eat.
2. Don’t Use Food as a Reward
One of the oldest parenting tricks in the book is to bribe children with dessert to get them to eat vegetables. This tactic is harmful for multiple reasons.
The food used as a reward is usually highly processed and loaded with sugar. Since humans already have a biological tendency toward sweets, using sugary foods as a reward can increase cravings, leading to obesity, tooth decay and other health issues.
A food-based reward system also interferes with a child’s ability to self-regulate. Receiving a treat as a reward teaches children to eat more for pleasure rather than nourishment. Once children are offered treats as rewards, they learn to associate these nutritionally-deficient foods as desirable and healthy options as a necessary evil. Promote healthy food choices by offering a variety of nutrient-rich vegan options and empowering kids to follow their bodies’ signals. These recipes include ingredients that are more affordable for families than plant-based alternative meats or dairy products.
3. Do Support Dietary Preferences
There are countless types of diets and reasons why individuals adhere to a specific one. Some do so out of medical necessity while others choose dietary practices that align with their value system.
Your child may adopt a diet that differs from your own. Aim to support that choice so long as your child is getting adequate nutrients. For example, a child who is a budding animal rights advocate may commit to veganism. Collaborate to find and prepare vegan recipes. Take the opportunity to learn more about your child and why following a vegan lifestyle is important to him or her.
4. Do Encourage Outside Time
Experts recommend that children of all ages spend at least 90 minutes outside each day. In reality, the average American child plays outdoors for only four to seven minutes daily. Adequate time spent in nature is found to develop confidence, boost creativity, reduce stress and anxiety and promote a sense of environmental stewardship. Try the following ideas to increase outside time:
Plant an edible garden
Create art projects using materials found in nature
Build a bird feeder
Take a hike to a scenic spot like a waterfall
5. Do Seek Help From a Medical Professional
If you find that your child is struggling to develop healthy habits, reach out to a medical professional for help. Instead of waiting to get in-person appointments or dealing with long travel times, seek virtual medical care. Online services are continuously expanding, giving you access to affordable, high-quality care and treatment from primary care providers, dieticians and any other pediatric specialist your child may need.
6. Do Model Positive Behaviors
Inspire your children to lead healthy, meaningful lives. Model positive behaviors and traits, such as mindful consumerism. Leading by example, for example, will help your children to not only make healthy choices for themselves but also be forces for positive change in the world. Teaching them leadership skills can help them develop traits such as integrity, which can last them a lifetime.
7. Help Make the World Wonderful for Them
Lastly, take steps whenever possible to help make the world a better place for your children to grow. Organizations such as Fair Start Movement, for example, strive to help provide support to policies that help kids from all walks of life have an equal opportunity at success in an ecologically sound world. Learn more about The Fair Start Model and look for ways that you and your family can donate or volunteer to help.
Teaching your child to make healthy choices is an action that will impact generations to come. Start early, be consistent and grow together.
Amboseli Love is working hard to achieve noble ends and is focused on next generations, like Fair Start.
Per their leadership:
The Amboseli Love is a non-profit organization based in Amboseli Kenya. Our primary focus is on Orphaned children, children living with disability HIV/AIDs, Rescued children from early marriages and most vulnerable in the community. Amboseli Village is located in Loitokitok, Kajiado South in Oloolarashi/Olgulului group ranch communal Land. Most Maasais in Amboseli are nomads and live in Manyatta Villages with population of around fifty families. With wife inheritance and wife sharing within age sets poses increased danger in spread and new born with HIV/AIDS. That’s where we Amboseli Love get in to educate the community on the risks of shared love and take over the affected children, educated, feed and nature them to their full potential.
I agree with recent thoughts from journalist and political commentator Fareed Zakaria: Democrats need to get back to bread-and-butter issues, start building things again, focus on gas prices, food prices, etc.
The culture wars are too divisive. I met 10 people recently, citizens and naturalized citizens from the Caribbean (Haiti, Trinidad, Jamaica), Europe (England), the USA and Africa (Nigeria), all of whom are concerned. Five have switched from the Democratic Party to independent, due to the culture wars, saying there’s too much emphasis on sexual orientation by politicians and people. There is no teacher, anywhere on this earth, who’s waking up and going to teach harmful sexual ideas to their students.
We are watching lies, misinformation and such disrespectful behaviors by certain groups who claim to be the moral police. We all care about all students receiving a quality public education and having opportunities to succeed. In my humble opinion, a lot of students are being taught hate, division, bigotry, racism and fear at their homes, places of worship and other places before they enter a school. I firmly believe that the foundation for everything starts in the homes.
There is a time and place for everything and everyone. The Democrats are the “party of the big tent,” with all welcome. Well, we still don’t have a message and we allow Republicans to control the narrative on every single issue. I’m terrified about democracy vs. autocracy.
Many nonprofits have been touting the success of energy efficiency or other campaigns designed to limit emissions.
The success of these efforts has been largely undone by overconsumption. This happens as demand for things like emissions-producing animal products, and even whole ecosystems, rises with growth. But it also happens at a much larger scale as that growth exacerbates the climate crisis on dozens of other levels, something that is enabled by many organizations’ anthropocentric and extractive environmental policies, and policies that failed to protect nature / the nonhuman world.
The crisis was fundamentally driven by the family policies – both tacit and explicit – that many nonprofits have simply accepted despite the harm they cause to women and children. These policies often quietly placed more children, animals, and ecosystems in harm’s way than the organizations’ campaigns were saving, and in a way that degraded human rights and democracy and empowered a few. I have spoken with leadership at nonprofits who admitted to me that their position on population growth, and their ignoring the massive child inequity that comes with such growth, was undoing their claimed success in fundraising materials, but these leaders were afraid to speak out for of fear of losing funding by being controversial.
Not only were many nonprofits embracing outdated family policies that let their wealthy funders pass massive privileges to their children while other children were being born and raised in horrific conditions, but now those vulnerable children will disproportionately suffer the impacts – long into the future – of the climate crisis.
This is not pure theory. I’ve worked in and with nonprofits in which leadership chose climate and population policies that hid the possibility of things like climate reparations, while also benefitting them personally at cost to the organizations’ stated missions. I have talked with prominent advocates of biodiversity who knew their Anthropocentric family policies were quietly causing extinction that undid their public claims, but who were terrified to change course. I have personally met with funders who for years held themselves out to the public as philanthropists protecting animals, in part by investing in vegan products, though they knew the population growth policies they tacitly or expressly supported and profited from were doing much more to harm animals than their investments were doing to help them. I’ve spoken with public officials who understood that growth policies were akin to a Ponzi pyramid scheme (per one Nobel Laureate) that degraded their own representative capacities while exacerbating inequity and the climate crisis, but who chose to do nothing about it.
Investing more in children, right from the start, in the beginning of justice.
It’s time to break this dynamic of fundamental injustice, and to constitute ourselves – through just family planning – as free and equal people.
TAKE ACTION NOW:
First, understand – based on arguments that now have five positive peer-reviews – that because every child’s right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, we have the right and obligation to recover the costs these lies have imposed on future generations, and by all means effective, if we actually use the funds and other resources to protect children. It is impossible to derive fundamental political obligations (like property rights) in ways that derogate from the actual/physical relations of consensual governance, which first depends on how we are created.
If you support a nonprofit that claims to protect children, the environment, animals, or human rights and democracy, urge them to disclose their current family policies. Are they opting for policies that could bring more children into horrific conditions than the number of children the group is actually serving? Are they opting for policies that could place more animals in harm’s way than the group is saving? Are the groups accounting for how growth is driving a climate crisis that is undoing local environmental efforts, or degrading democracy in relationships between people irrespective of formal changes in political systems? Urge them to instead adopt more ethical models like Fair Start or comparable options.
Florida continues to see tens of thousands of children abused each year, with many of them dying in the process. And the state care system, despite changes, continues to fail them.
Fair Start Movement’s mission is to replace parent-centric subjective family planning systems with a child-centric model that ensures children are born and raised in conditions consistent – minimally – with the Children’s Rights Convention, a move enabled via effective family planning incentives/entitlements. We partner with organizations around the world, like the wonderful Rejoice Africa Foundation (formerly Kibengo Youth Care Activists), on Fair Start and other initiatives.
Thank you for being a leader in the efforts to assure family planning needs are being met worldwide. Given recent discussions of your foundations possibly funding a world children’s savings bank, if these reports are true, we urge one simple guideline for such a plan. That guideline would correct the baseline error, or the act of trying to assess costs and benefits without orienting from a position of consensual governance, described further below. We urge that the gift recognize that much of the wealth was built on a system of unsustainable growth and illegitimately externalized costs, per one Nobel Laurate, that included billions having and raising children in conditions that did not satisfy the standards children and their parents deserve, the standards that were eventually codified in the Children’s Rights Convention.
Is there evidence that we see children as economic inputs, rather than citizens, and not deserving of minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecologies, and an influential voice in their democracies? The ubiquitous bemoaning of falling fertility rates as a “baby bust” economic crisis, with no plans to assure children the things described as various policies are offered to reverse the crisis, is ample proof.
Our work establishing this fundamental baseline for assessing costs and benefits, and the human rights nature of child-centric planning as oriented to protect the vulnerable parties at stake, has been subject to almost half-a-dozen peer reviews. And the claim that a fair start in life logically precedes governmental authority to issue the property rights on which the wealth was built – because we are before we do – seems irrefutable. How could we be self-determining or free in an anthropocentric world dominated by a singularly human-centric viewpoint, rather than a natural or nonhuman one – built into family planning – that allow humans to consent to the power of others? Without that primacy we never constitute fair, or free and equal, societies. We never create the consensual, inclusive, and participatory town halls necessary to actually regulate the wealth-building economies. Free people will condition their political obligations on their capacity, as equals, to change those obligations. Fair Start enables this.
This is our challenge: If your plans are to give as reported, please designate at least part of the funds – by COP 27 – as human rights entitlements designed to move us towards the fundamental baseline discussed above, one which actually complies with the requirements of the international human rights regime. Surely, as things like the threat of climate-driven mass famine in the Horn of Africa unfold, it’s clear that our current, anthropocentric, isolating, and inequitable system of family planning was a terrible mistake. Fair incentives/entitlements, designed to build the town halls that liberate us, could have prevented that. If children deserve the funds, they deserve the efficacy putting the funds into bending the arc of planning and growth would produce through things like allowing delay and preparation, creating changes in family size, ensuring opportunities for co-investment, encouraging relocation etc. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one and there is a test for whether we are doing that consistent with human rights and democracy.
The entitlements are not paying for people. They are paying to convert – at the most fundamental or creative level – commercial relations into empowering democratic/normative relations, or the sort of town hall relations needed to regulate the second-order forms of shopping malls. If we value democracy it will be unreasonable for intending parents to refuse the empowering funds, and unreasonable for concentrations of wealth and power to refuse to give them. Whether we are part of groups of free and equal people first depends on whether we correct the baseline error described above (reiterated in the Cairo Consensus which wrongly treats the act of having kids as more self-determining for the parents than other-determining for the children born) and are part of efforts to ensure people are relatively self-determining through collective child-centric planning, or we are not part of such efforts. There is no obligation that can proceed this – becoming a just people.
Legal systems, markets, customs, etc., can only do so much to guide human behavior. The gaps depend on – and in government by the people should depend upon – the circumstances in which we are born and develop and which lead to our emancipation. The value of democracy – the “We the People” – includes the high quality of life sharing the world with people prepared for such systems – with a common core of objective values, prosocial dispositions, high levels of education and equity, etc. – would entail. The antecedent “we,” that proceeds all action, is actually a reference to power relations between people, and between people and their environment, that for self-governing people should arise from birth and development. Collective child-centric planning can get us there, but because group legitimacy derives from individual choice, each person must choose whether they support or reject fundamental fairness and choose to be part of just or unjust systems.
Without this change in entitlements, we risk a future – as the climate crisis deepens – where the system by which we made our wealth does more harm to future generations than our philanthropy can do to help them. We risk choosing not to constitute ourselves as free and equal people. and remaining part of an unjust and exploitative system. Instead, we can follow the lead of others choosing to reorient entitlements, and through that discourse and action, choose to be part of consensual systems of governance.
Thanks for considering, and for your work to date.
Almost every claim of valuing something that we commonly make has been and is being physically undone by a baseline/border error in our universal family planning policies, and the constant violations of the Children’s Convention it causes.
The error makes our political systems fundamentally unjust. The error also makes claims misleading, converting empowering democratic relations that limit and decentralize power into exploitative commercial ones that do the opposite.
Pressing claimants to account for the actual people in their claims – to stop abstracting – demonstrates this. Ask anyone making a policy claim to account for the minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecology, and effective democratic voice, they are ensuring for the people – and the future majority that would be impacted by – their claim. If they cannot account for these basic values, they are not making a morally coherent claim.
Many are already moving in that direction with the most effective reforms possible, and choosing not to be part of an unjust, or preconstitutional and anthropocentric, system that exploits rather than invests in kids.
TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO HELP BEND THE ARC OF WHO WE ARE TOWARDS JUSTICE.
