Education is compulsory for children, beyond the massive return on investment it ensures, because it is seen as a prerequisite to democracy. Why? Democracy requires people are sufficiently developed, and have enough of a common core, to come to agreement on the rules under which they should live. But most education laws were written before recent developments in child psychology that show the core of the ability to socialize with others and come to agreement — empathy and a disposition for prosocial behavior — develop very early in our lives, including our infancy.
That’s a problem. How can we have functional town halls without preparing people to care enough for each other to work together? Also, consider the return on investment point above: Education has a huge impact because it determines much about the full measure of our lives, and is designed to impact the majority of our — and all future generations — interactions with others.
All of this suggests that while family planning laws and educational systems are often decoupled, they should not be. We learn at least as much as home as we do at school. Rather, our family planning systems should be the first aspect of educational systems — moving upstream to help assure the social development and educational goals are achieved, and enough to meet that “town hall” standard.
What’s blocking this coupling of systems, family planning and education, that would do so much good?
Big business exerts a lot of influence on our family planning systems, using them to ensure population growth and poor educational outcomes in their quest to create lots of people for shopping malls, rather than fewer people for town halls where their voice matters.
Republicans pushed for changes in the tax code to do just this, and democrats were quick to join the effort. Yes, that’s the level of influence they have in keeping education from really working. They push as many people, through failing systems, as possible to ensure more consumers, cheap future labor, and large tax bases. That’s not what functional town halls look like. But the taboo against change is deep. I’ve worked with animal protection groups and funders whose purported missions commit them to this change, but they won’t support it for fear of backlash– in the end contravening their missions.
What’s the solution? Our political systems are not the final answer when it comes to making policy. Human rights override those systems and empower people to demand change at a constitutional level. Given that creating people for democracy is so important, so primary in nature, we can help intending parents to target the concentrations of wealth and power that made so much money debilitating family planning systems to pay for the reforms we need. Why?
Because people come first, and people come from family planning systems — whether they work well or not. We need to make sure they do work well, for example, through regearing them around equity: every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life as the first and overriding human right. Without that, how can we come from a just place?
And that move is not as abstract as it sounds. It could be as simple as replacing our pro-unsustainable growth federal child tax policy with a truly equitable and ecologically restorative one that funds family planning-based humane education as a matter of the fundamental right to full — and effective — development as part of true democracies.
We might initiate this through a simple discourse of demand and override — in which the wealthy are urged to admit what they owe, we can lay claim to the funding that would link family planning and educational systems, and build the democracies we deserve, one child at a time. We could combine that with eliminating tax credits for wealthy families (150K+ a year as an example, or a multi-faceted eligibility approach to determination) and the savings could be used 1) to increase credits proportionally for lower incomes, 2) fund a federal human education pilot program under the Dept. of Education, 3) accompanied by a federal messaging campaign modeled on NTSB seatbelt campaigns to promote “delayed families for all.”
Let’s see family planning and education as part of the same system, and start making citizens for town halls, not consumers for shopping malls. That’s what freedom requires.
“Beauty has no age limit. Fertility does.” Ad issued by Italian government in campaign to boost fertility rate.
Let’s find a way to reduce child poverty without signaling that society needs to exploit more babies to grow economies. There was a time when a case could be made that bringing more children into the world was a benefit to society. Today, with the overwhelming demands of nearly 8 billion people inflicting serious damage on the planet’s life-supporting ecosystems, there is no case for encouraging births, especially when it will harm the very children we have. More births portend a bleak future for today’s and future children – whom we should be protecting, not exploiting. Public policy needs to catch up with this harsh reality.
For too long, the decision to bring a child into this world has been all about the “rights” and desires of the prospective parent, with little regard for the rights of children. The rights of children should be paramount, eclipsing other rights and agendas. Nothing could be more important. That’s one reason I admire and support the work of the Fair Start Movement.
Today, we’re witnessing unenlightened state and business agendas to reverse the trend of dropping birth rates. “People want it. Society needs it. We want the economy to grow,” proclaims Lyman Stone, an adjunct fellow at the pro-growth American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
On a full planet, it’s time we put an end to pro-natal agendas and rhetoric that pressure, incentivize or otherwise encourage prospective parents to add to our numbers. Let’s consider pro-natal public policies because they are surging today.
Bear with me while I set the stage:
Birth rates have been dropping around the world for 60 years, and that drop may be accelerating today – for many reasons. There is some lag, but after birth rates drop below replacement rate, a population eventually begins to contract. While that’s not happening yet to our global numbers, many countries have begun to experience this contraction. And there are more to come. Sadly, this is getting negative attention.
But it’s actually really good news. It’s an indication that we’re collectively planning for and investing more in each child, which naturally brings down family size. It also means more female autonomy, improved access to education and employment opportunities for women, better access to contraception and other family planning services, and a reduction in teen pregnancies.
Another contributing factor is it’s become SO apparent that we’re doing serious damage to our home planet. Our climate, biodiversity, soil, and water are all degrading before our eyes. Young adults today are reluctant to bring a child into such an uncertain world, and many do not want to contribute to this destruction by adding more people.
On an overpopulated planet, we ought to celebrate declining birth rates. It’s exactly what is needed so we can ease our pressure on ecosystems, allowing them to return to health and meet our needs, the needs of other species, and especially the needs of the world’s children. Unfortunately, I’m observing the exact opposite. There’s an unexamined assumption that, “of course we must replenish ourselves” (replenishing is something we should do when we’re at a sustainable population).
Growth-addicted policymakers in numerous nations have been panicking about what’s being termed a “baby bust.” These fears over a shrinking population are so common, they’ve earned the labels, “depopulation panic” and “baby-bust alarmism.” Some of this panic stems from the fact that governments have been engaged in a population Ponzi scheme, relying on tax revenue from an ever-growing pool of citizens to fund services for those born decades earlier. Plus, a growing population means more workers and more consumers year after year, an easy recipe for GDP growth. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers….”
Of course, a high rate of GDP growth is the Holy Grail. Economic growth is the most universal public policy goal on the planet. AEI’s Stone, who is also a research fellow at the conservative think tank, Institute for Family Studies, laments, “There is no economy that has managed to knock out gangbuster growth with a declining population.”
If you’re addicted to growth and running a Ponzi scheme, it can be very alarming to see it begin to unravel. And if you’re running for reelection and you can’t brag about economic growth during your administration, you’re pretty much done.
So, officials in numerous countries are instituting policies designed to boost the birth rate. According to the U.N., 10% of the world’s nations had explicitly pro-natal policies in 1976, but that number began to rise sharply at the turn of this century, and has almost tripled (28% in 2015, the most recent data). Hungary, Poland, Greece, Japan, and Korea are just a few of the nations very actively attempting to reverse population contraction.
It’s too seldom discussed, but pressuring women to birth more taxpayers, workers or consumers is an abhorrent violation of their human rights. It commodifies children and dehumanizes women, reducing them to incubators in service to an overheated economy hooked on unsustainable growth. Women and couples should be making family-size decisions free from political and cultural pressure to procreate. As for future children, they have a right to inherit a healthy planet and a shot at living decent lives.
Even in the U.S., where social support programs have traditionally received limited funding, support for unsustainable and inequitable baby-making has begun ratcheting up. Child tax credits, child allowances, paid family leave, and child care subsidies are getting miraculous bipartisan support. The American Rescue Plan (a response to COVID) has been providing $3,000 to $3,600 per child in tax credits annually – through the end of 2021. Efforts are underway to extend it. Senator Mitt Romney this year proposed The Family Security Act, which would also send a monthly check to families for each child.
In defending the proposal, Senator Romney said, “We’re creating an incentive for people to be able to form families and to have children because we’re recognizing that we’re not reproducing ourselves.” In one interview, Romney stated, “Our population is declining pretty substantially. We’re down, I think, 5.8 million people from where we would have been had we maintained the birth rate of the last decade. So, we’ve got some work to do.” Clearly, he is not aware that we’re in overshoot (the scale of the human enterprise – our economy and our population – has outgrown our planet).
Policies and projects to increase birth rates in several nations have met with mixed results. That’s not deterring policymakers desperate for growth. Advice from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: “America needs more babies. Public policy alone cannot deliver them, but it can help.”
Pro-natal public policy emerges in – and helps perpetuate – a pro-natal culture. Emma Green, in The Rebirth of America’s Pro-Natalist Movement (The Atlantic, 2017) wrote, “Ultimately, a shared cultural commitment to the importance of children is the factor that will determine America’s baby-making future.”
While it is concerning that today we live in a pro-natal culture, I’m optimistic because young adults today are transforming that culture. They are choosing to delay childbearing and choosing to have fewer children. They understand a meaningful life does not require motherhood. They recognize that raising a child is a huge commitment, it’s expensive, and it does require sacrificing career and other priorities. And, of course, many appreciate that a full planet doesn’t benefit from a growing human population.
Protecting today’s children from poverty is a noble goal. But encouraging higher birth rates isn’t the way to do that. It guarantees those children will inherit a dead planet. It’s challenging to develop policy that alleviates child poverty but does not incentivize prospective parents to bring more children into the world. I don’t know the answer to that dilemma. But policymakers working on this must have a full understanding of the fact that we’re in overshoot. This means we need to embrace and celebrate dropping birth rates and contracting population, not fight it.
Let your elected representatives know you do not support policies that attempt to bribe women to birth more taxpayers, workers, and consumers. Let them know you support policies that reduce child poverty, but only those that do not also increase the number of children.
How did we end up in a world with massive wealth in the hands of a few and ecosystems crashing as our climates degrade? The answer is surprising. Rather than invest in early childhood development, at the crucial phase in the middle of the Twentieth Century, world leaders chose population growth and the creation of mass consumers, cheap labor and large bases of taxpayers.
Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always coming from an unjust place.
Ruby Fox is a fourth year student studying Society and Environment with a concentration on Justice and Sustainability at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in systemic injustice, environmental issues, childhood development, and food sovereignty, and looks forward to working with educational facilities and community organizations in the future.
Oftentimes when people are considering whether or not to have children, they think about their own wants and needs. Instead, parents should be considering the needs of the prospective child as they consider their own. Most people understand that humanity is moving into trying times as climate change exacerbates our social issues in profound and unpredictable ways.
Potential parents must be thoughtful about their own motivations, the social stratification of society, and worsening global environmental conditions when building a family. Intention and motivation is not often questioned when discussing pregnancy. Many people simply decide that they are “ready for a family.” While everyone deserves love and connection, creating a whole new life to increase the quality of your own should not be the immediate response to craving community. Many academics have argued against the compulsory expectation or cultural entitlement to bearing children on ethical grounds. Christine Overall wrote Why Have Children (2012) to ponder the philosophy and ethics of procreation, concluding that the least selfish life plan may not include parenthood, especially for those who would have children only to “please others, to conform to convention, or to benefit themselves based on the delusion that children will fix their problems” (219). Giving breath to another being holds the parent at least partially culpable for any harm against that being. Raising a child requires more than desire and healthy financial support; it requires attention, energy, commitment, patience, and unconditional love for a child to grow into their own unique person.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
Parents want to believe the ability to protect and support their child is absolute, but life is unpredictable, and that support inevitably falters from events outside of parental control. Making a family and playing a parental role cannot be the only goal for prospective parents when children exist outside the familial vacuum as independent people and members of greater society. Outside of the individual growth, people must consider the social conditions that each baby is born into. As class demographics shift overtime, researchers have seen the association between marriage and child poverty weaken over time, while the association between work and poverty became stronger, suggesting the limitations of “overemphasizing marriage and the growing importance of work for reducing child poverty in America” (Baker 1166).
People must understand that a stable marriage and a paying job alone cannot provide the financial or emotional security necessary to raise children. Research shows significant negative association between parenthood and emotional well-being in high-income countries, especially in the US, due to stress heavily attributable to lack of social policy support with lower-income parents coping with worse emotional well-being and more stress (Glass et al). In 2019, the American foster care removed over 251,359 children from their homes, making a total of 423,997 children living in the foster care system (AFCARS Report). Sixty-three percent of removals were due to neglect, often arising from the inability to cope with the stress and expectations of parenthood.
Our current systems make it incredibly difficult to raise children with their basic needs met, let alone extra support and opportunity. Prospective parents should not only consider their ability to provide for their children in a tumultuous economic climate, but also whether their children will be able to provide adequately for themselves moving forward. Another issue outside parental control, but still within the scope of parental considerations, is our changing environment. Our societal struggle to reconcile the impending doom of climate change is a relatively new issue in parenting as well. Like most issues facing humanity, climate change is a wicked problem, a complex, ill defined, interconnected problem whose solutions present subsequent issues.
Prospective parents must consider how they will support their families through devastating environmental threats: erratic day-to-day weather conditions, increasing pollution, extreme environmental disasters, population displacement, inconsistency in global supply chains and manufacturing, etc. For example, without extreme policy shifts and decreasing freshwater availability, about 2.3 billion more people than today (over 40% of the global population in total) are expected to be living in river basins under severe water stress; globally, land prices worldwide will skyrocket as agricultural lands become more scarce, and more urgently necessary (OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050).
Issues like these will become more relevant in child development worldwide, including in high-income countries, like the US, that do not currently bear the brunt of climate related issues. One of the largest social shifts at this point in human history is the scope of parental responsibility to expand past the parents’ lifetime to include the hardship of generations to come.
Works Cited
Baker, Regina S. “The Changing Association Among Marriage, Work, and Child Poverty in the United States, 1974–2010.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 77, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1166–1178., www.jstor.org/stable/2458272
“Births and Natality.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3 Aug. 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/births.htm.
Glass, Jennifer et al. “Parenthood and Happiness: Effects of Work-Family Reconciliation Policies in 22 OECD Countries.” AJS; American journal of sociology vol. 122,3 (2016): 886-929. doi:10.1086/688892
“OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction – Key Facts and Figures.” OECD, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 2012, https://www.oecd.org/env/indicators-modelling-outlooks/oecdenvironmentaloutlookto205 0theconsequencesofinaction-keyfactsandfigures.htm.
Overall, Christine. Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate. MIT Press, 2014.
Rieder, N. “Procreation, Adoption and the Contours of Obligation.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 3, 2015, pp. 293–309. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26813113.
Saad, Lydia. “Americans, in Theory, Think Larger Families Are Ideal.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 6 July 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/236696/americans-theory-think-larger-families-ideal.aspx.
“The AFCARS Report.” The US Department of Health and Human Services, 23 June 2020
National organizations urge COP26 leaders to protect most vulnerable
San Francisco, CA – Dozens of leading NGOs are calling on the President and Delegates of the COP26 in this open letter to take an urgent and clear public position recommending just and sustainable family planning as the most effective solution to address the climate crisis, and rising global inequality, including gender inequity.
The global community has failed to inform and support a universal effort towards just and sustainable family planning, which:
Is human-rights centered
Ensures sustainable and equitable resources for greater investment in each child
Enables communities and governments to protect children and future generations while upholding reproductive rights
On the contrary, pressures to increase births, or to obstruct family planning programs, are driving our biggest crises and putting the health, safety, and welfare of current and future generations in peril. Unsustainable population growth, a documented threat multiplier, is contributing to catastrophic climate change, unprecedented flooding, pandemics, ecosystem destruction, groundwater depletion, mass extinctions, and environmental degradation. Worsening inequality, in large part driven by our growing population, is also a grave threat to democracy and political stability across the globe.
Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director of Population Balance says, “Our growth-driven policies are not only a cause of immense suffering for marginalized human and ecological communities, present and future, but they are premised upon oppressive power structures. Not only are reproductive, intergenerational, and ecological justice under attack, our current unsustainable growth-centred family planning policies are threatening all life on earth. We collectively need to acknowledge and address the urgency of this predicament.”
Fair Start Movement is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming family planning by replacing growth-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-first Fair Start model.
Population Balance is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization that provides education and solutions to address the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals.
It’s this simple: If we – each one of us – wants to be coming from a place of justice, we have to prioritize giving every child a fair start in life.
That means reforming our family planning systems – through high incentives and entitlements – to ensure all future children minimum levels of welfare, approaching birth equity, and a meaningful role in their democracies. It means stopping pushing women to have kids.
Those systems make most claims about us making the world a better place misleading; our creation norm and paradigm contradicts and is busy undoing the things we claim.
How? Every day we do things that show we wish to be self-determining people, to be free and not determined by others. But there is a cognitive dissonance at work here blocking that from happening. The level at which we can be self-determining first depends on who we are – on our creation and our initial relations to others. If we don’t use fairness at that point, we end up with power differentials that subject some person to the power of others. We never constitute, or come together as free nd equal people under an ongoing condition of limited and decentralized power.
Take Action: The most just solution to our crises is also the most effective
Our nations are not constituted by god-like founders in the past. They are constantly being constituted by people, as we create and care for them – and the majority of people and whose rights matter, will live in the future. If we don’t start that process fairly, at Fair Start, we always come from an unjust place. We remain preconstitutional. We can do better.
1. Join us in this simple discourse, in which we admit to each other that every child’s right to a Fair Start limits our right to wealth and makes it partially subject to the needs of future generations. No nation, or its legal system, can claim any form of political legitimacy without prioritizing every child’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life, which transfers power – or constitutes – from the most powerful to the least.
Let’s come together from a just place.
2. Let’s urge the United Nations to make Fair Start – under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a universal standard. Nothing exists outside the frame of justifiable we, and it starts with the creation of future generations.
Why are we facing climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies? How did things not get better than they were in the past? As a new peer-reviewed book by folks at the Fair Start Movement makes clear, these problems derive from a massive power grab by elites in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
The core claim it makes, that fair family policies which – restore a biodiverse nonhuman world, ensure equal opportunities for children, and build democracies where each person actually has the capacity to influence outcomes – would override all competing interests and rights has been subject to five successful peer-reviews: The Primary Right, A Human Rights Approach to Planning Families, Constituting Over Constitutions, The Right to Matter, and Justice as a Fair Start in Life. But we don’t need peer-review to understand the claim. How could we reject these values and believe in any viable conception of freedom, especially as the loss of nature through the climate crisis seriously harms infants? How can we separate these values from our creation, and how could anything logically precede creation – or existential – justice?How could we actually choose who has power over us without the “first election” of a just family planning norm?
Rather than ensure equal opportunities for all, and ecological sustainability via properly interpreting Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, world leaders invented a family planning model that evaded their collective responsibility to invest in and protect future generations. They pretended an interpersonal right was personal. They went for “nobody else’s business” over actually protecting kids. And by using that nonsense to maintain the trajectories at the time, they went for growth over equity.
They faked justice, and human rights, to protect existing power structures. Yes, we all got scammed, and our children will suffer as a result.
But as the book demonstrates, there is no real justice without a Fair Start in life. And right now, taking resources from the top of the wealth pyramid – the one Nobel Laureate Steven Chu recently decried – and using those resources as better family planning incentives/entitlements would have ten to twenty times the beneficial impact on the the climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies we are faced with today relative to downstream approaches. Fair Start is justice and freedom, or ensuring the capacity to consent to the influence of others.
This is the bottom line: Unless we prioritize an ecosocial Fair Start in life, we are not coming from a just place. Precons won’t prioritize each child getting a fair start in life. Free people will. Full stop.
Making them first apologize and then pay, via Fair Start incentives and entitlements, is the most just and effective way to compensate future generations for things like the climate crisis, with impacts that are ten to twenty times more effective than the downstream measures other nonprofits are promoting. Don’t get scammed. First things first – let’s start by creating optimal and just populations.
Which corporations and nonprofits are benefitting from unsustainable and inequitable family planning – the biggest driver of the climate and inequality crises – while pretending to further environmental and social justice? Federal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosure requirements provide an opportunity to find out and act. Support Fair Start’s campaign for an executive order to require disclosure of policies and advocacy around the biggest factor of all – families – so that we can hold bad actors accountable.
Why not be effective?
We are urging the Biden Administration to do what should be painfully obvious by now – actually account for the greatest driver of the climate and other crises that gave need for a new ESG disclosure framework: Our family and population growth policies.
Why report at all if we do not account for the underlying driver/multiplier, and the volatility inherent in it?
We need to know who, among us, promotes putting an unlimited number of children, without any guaranteed levels of preparation, equity, or influential role in their democracy, into an increasingly degraded ecological future.And in terms of the past, we need to know which groups said they were making progress, knowing the growth they supported was undoing that progress the whole timeand moving wealth away from effective investments in children and into the hands of people at the top of the wealth pyramid.
Governments are failing children’s right to an eco social fair start in life. We know that early childhood experience is pivotal to lifetime outcomes. Why are we waiting for adverse childhood experiences to occur before acting?
Children deserve equitable conditions, right from the beginning. A fair start in life is the first human right – it overrides all others. It is what children are entitled to under the Children’s Rights Convention, and what allows them to eventually be free from the power of others, and truly self-determining. Because legitimate governance derives from people, who derive from the norms that create them, there are no such things as just societies, political legitimacy and freedom without the sort of Fair Start reforms discussed in this site. Without them we are always proceeding from, or reconstituting our political societies, from an unjust position.
Ensuring an eco-social #fairstart in life for all kids can have ten to twenty times the long run impact on the key social and ecological crises we are facing today relative to other interventions.
The UN has been obligated to interpret the promise of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that of a right “to found a family,” in a way that would protect the right for all generations equally. This includes those in the middle of the Twentieth Century, and those in 2050 for example, equally. It should have also interpreted Article 16 consistent with other human rights obligations, like the Children’s Rights Convention, and well as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Mountains of evidence show young persons are not able to exercise their right equally because of many population-driven threats to the children they would have, including significant birth impacts. In other words, the UN failed to interpret and administer Article 16 correctly.
In fact it caved to member state pressures to maintain large and unsustainable families and population growth rates in the Twentieth century, and violated future generations’ rights to safely and sustainably found their families under Article 16. Because men – under enabling from the UN – pushed women to have large families in the past, younger generations today have to worry about having even one child, given the ecological future that child faces. Moreover, women who were pushed to have children under the growth paradigm enabled by the UN’s modeling – and have children despite the risks of Covid-19 – are dying in massively disproportionate numbers. We need to hold those who enabled this accountable.
Activists should start by engaging the relatively wealthy children of UN officials, in this special form of lawful and peaceful constitutional dialogue and social change, geared around our just desert to family planning incentives/entitlements. There is nothing more just than targeting an extant minority for the benefit of the countless future majority. This process will build, targeting the concentrations of wealth and power – both public and private – most responsible for the climate and other crises we face today, including those that most benefited from past, inequitable and unsustainable interpretations of Article 16.
Take action: Urge United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres @antonioguterres to speak out and act to protect all generations’ right to found a family.
