Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Is having kids the one behavior that most influences our lives?

Most parents will tell you that it is. Even if you haven’t had kids, it’s easy to imagine why they would have a huge impact: they change our day-to-day routines and the structure of our love and relationships. But there’s something else going on, another level up, when we think about this question. Chances are that when you, the reader, think about how kids affect our lives, you think about the impacts on what appear to be our personal lives, at home. But the truth is that having kids is probably the one behavior that most influences our lives in the world as a whole—and determines what the world around us is like.

Take a look at this shocking video, which shows how people having kids has defined the world we live in today. And not all of the influence is good.

According to Slate, The Global Footprint Network estimates that our global civilization currently uses 1.6 times the resources our planet generates. In other words, it takes 18 months to regenerate the resources we use in one year’s time. Add another 4 billion people (which we are currently on course to do!) to the mix, and we’re likely to be looking at a whole other planet.

How do we respond to this challenge? The answer may lie in how we think about having kids. As shown above, we might default to thinking about the act of having kids as personal. And that’s perfectly consistent with a universally ingrained one-sided model of thinking about having kids that focuses on and isolates parents.

What’s the alternative? The Having Kids model, which is designed to let parents think globally about the act of having kids and to work together with other people to make all children’s futures the best they can be. The model is about using the excess that goes into creating large families to instead raise the standard of entry into the world for every child.

So if you want to change the world, watch the video to learn where to start: at the source. Then adopt the Having Kids model. If we work together, we can change the world for everyone.

Recent polls show a dramatic drop in what we consider the ideal number of children to have. According to Gallup and the Pew Research Center,

In 1971, there was a shift in attitudes, as Americans’ “ideal” family switched from four kids (19%) to two kids (38%), with a mean saying 2.9 kids was ideal. Back in 1936, the mean ideal number of kids was 3.6, with 22% saying four children; 32% saying three children; and another 32% saying two children. Fast-forward from the 1930s to 2013, the most recent data available, and you get a different picture, with 2.6 as the mean ideal.

Pew attributes much of the change to access to contraception, women’s participation the workforce, and the rising cost of raising kids. Moreover,

Not only do Americans say smaller families are more ideal, they’re also having smaller families. In 1976, 36% of women in their early 40s had given birth to four or more children, while just 22% gave birth to two children.But according to 2014 data, it’s more common nowadays for women of the same age to have two children: 35% gave birth to two children, while just 12% had four or more.

What neither Pew nor Gallup mention is what would have happened without the trend toward smaller families, a trend that occurred worldwide. One United Nations prediction showed that the world’s population would’ve risen to 256 billion by 2150 had the global fertility rate remained at its 1995 level of 3.04 children per woman, rather than dropping to 2.52 in 2010.

The Having Kids model — which promotes families working together to invest more in each child — is on trend. It’s part of a vital evolution in parenting that is making the world a better place. You can be part of this change.

French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy recently said that “[t]he first cause of environmental degradation… is the number of people on the planet.” His statement came in the context of discussing climate change generally. On a late-night TV talk show, he acknowledged that climate change was “a very serious challenge” and said that “the real challenge is that of demographic change.” 

Why have leaders in the U.S. been silent on the issue of family planning models? The U.S. population continues to explode, bring along high rates of consumption, an increasingly degraded climate and environment, dysfunctionally crowded cities, and increasingly massive gaps between rich and poor, alongside democracies that no longer work.

Let’s not wait for politicians. You can make the future safe, healthy, and happy for all by helping to create a new model of family planning where smaller families work together to plan a better future for every child. 

New York Magazine deserves credit for publicizing the science of family planning decision-making while also lauding the growing social acceptability of not having children. But what if there’s a third choice?

Despite the recent findings that having kids might be harmful to your self-esteem, it’s pretty safe to say that American culture is “pronatalist:” As soon as you graduate college, start a career, and find a long-term partner, the next level of the video game called life is parenthood. Whether it’s your mom asking about would-be grandkids over the holidays or the endless parade of domestic sitcoms, there’s an agreed-upon assumption that “family” includes children, and that not having kids must be the result of infertility or just not getting around to it (yet). But these expectations are at odds with changes in the way people are living. From the 1970s to the 2000s, the number of childless women in the U.S. nearly doubled, and national data suggests that 15 percent of women and 24 percent of men hit 40 without having kids.

But the article and underlying study might be missing an important point by narrowly focusing on the all-or-nothing dichotomy of having or not having children.

What if there were a third choice, where people could choose to help raise the next generation — with whom they will share the world — without being sucked into the hip-locked commitment of helicopter parenting or age-group isolation of child-free social groups? What if family planning and parenting were something we all did collectively through sharing time, love, attention, and resources? What if we wanted to do this, given the impact that parenting future generations has on all of us? Would that change our choices about parenting? One possibility is that many more would choose to parent via this community model, and that future generations would benefit from the massive investment that choice would create.