Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Want to help address and solve key crises around the world, including improving child welfare, decreasing the inequality gap, building democracy, and mitigating climate change and other environmental threats? Here’s how.

• Numerous studies have shown that early childhood interventions — such as a family planning model that alters the conditions in which children are born and first raised — create the best returns in terms of improved child welfare.
• Those early investments can reduce the long-term effects that unequal early childhood conditions have on children, including our current massive health and income gaps between adults.
• Increasing early childhood investments, especially through modeling that promotes smaller families investing more in each child, is also a uniquely effective way to build the connected communities that real democracies require.
• Studies have also shown that planning smaller families is the most effective way to mitigate climate change and other environmental threats, in some cases reducing impact with twenty times more efficacy than other protective measures.

Sign the Fair Start Declaration today and help us create the future we all want.

At Having Kids:

We promote and protect every child’s right to a fair start in life by replacing unsustainable, parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-centered Fair Start family planning model. The model suggests a shift in family planning from a subjective focus on just the parents, to an objective focus that considers the interests of the potential child, the parents, and the community.

It’s all about this: Smaller families working together to give every child a fair start in life.

Today many families are adopting the Fair Start family planning model. First, they try to give their child a fair start in life by having a smaller family where they can invest more in their child. Often they also foster or adopt one of the many children eagerly waiting for parents rather than creating additional need. Second, they publicly role model their choices. Finally, these families join public advocacy campaigns to shift resources from extractive centers of power like governments, corporations, and wealthy families in order to democratically empower children and future citizens by incentivizing better family planning by all parents. Why? All parents know that the quality of their own child’s life will depend on how other parents decide to have and raise their kids.

Writing for The Guardian, William Rees provides an informed and intelligent voice on how to solve what may be the most pressing problems in the world today:

The proximate drivers are excess economic production and consumption, and over-population.… Carbon dioxide is accumulating at an accelerating rate in the atmosphere and 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record. . . .

At the same time, this is a world of chronic gross social inequity that erodes population health and social cohesion. According to Oxfam, the world’s richest eight billionaires possess the same wealth as the poorest 50% of the human family. More generally, the richest quintile of humanity takes home about 70% of global income compared with just 2% by the poorest fifth of the population…. This situation is egregiously unjust, socially destabilising and ecologically precarious.

His solution is sound and feasible: “[P]lanned degrowth toward a quasi steady-state economy is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving the overall quality of life, even in high-income countries. Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and the number of non-human species that would be preserved, it is also a morally compelling strategy.”

How can we move forward to this solution? The first step is for governments and the United Nations to abandon current family planning models in favor of one based on true human rights—like the Fair Start model. This model balances the right to have children against every child’s right to a fair and equitable start in life.

Support the change we need by signing our Fair Start petition.

Recently, Having Kids was featured in Stanford University’s Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere’s newsletter.

As their website explains, the Alliance is unique:

What happens when natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists work together and discover a new type of intelligence, foresight intelligence:  the ability to implement behavioral, institutional and cultural changes necessary for humans to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all? What happens when foresight intelligence meets the best of global civil society? Quite simply, we can reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and social inequities before it is too late.

How does Having Kids add to the Alliance? We bring social scientists and lawyers, among others, who have studied family modeling and who know how to change the parent-centered model into a sustainable and human rights-based child-centered model. Having Kids also adds families to the Alliance who are already leading by example.

You can be a part of this vital work.

At Having Kids:

We promote and protect every child’s right to a fair start in life by replacing unsustainable, parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-centered Fair Start family planning model. The model suggests a shift in family planning from a subjective focus on just the parents, to an objective focus that considers the interests of the potential child, the parents, and the community.

It’s all about this: Smaller families working together to give every child a fair start in life.

Today many families are adopting the Fair Start family planning model. First, they try to give their child a fair start in life by having a smaller family where they can invest more in their child. Often they also foster or adopt one of the many children eagerly waiting for parents rather than creating additional need. Second, they publicly role model their choices. Finally, these families join public advocacy campaigns to shift resources from extractive centers of power like governments, corporations, and wealthy families in order to democratically empower children and future citizens by incentivizing better family planning by all parents. Why? All parents know that the quality of their own child’s life will depend on how other parents decide to have and raise their kids.

Those who grew up in the Great Depression, fought in World War Two, and built the post-war economy are often called the Greatest Generation because of their response to the threats of their day. Today, climate change is widely considered to pose the greatest threat to human wellbeing. Could millennials become an even greater generation by their response to the threat of climate change?

The good news is that millennials are already on their way to doing just that by engaging in the most effective climate change mitigation strategy available: having smaller families. Yes, there are other approaches: By adopting available “eco-friendly” actions, including meticulous recycling, an American couple could curb their lifetime carbon footprint by 486 tons. But by simply by having one fewer child, an American woman would reduce her “carbon legacy” (the summed emissions of herself and her descendants weighted by relatedness) by 9,441 tons.

Millennials are nevertheless being pushed from all corners to have more kids. Dangerous political and religious factions in Washington are limiting access to reproductive health services. Celebrities model and promote large biological families, even when it risks their health. And even our public discourse pushes women to have kids in order to drive economic growth.

Millennials can still become the greatest generation. They just need to ignore the voices that don’t care about climate change and our world’s environment. Instead, they need to continue embracing the smaller family ethic.