Category: Family Planning & Child Rights

Edward Christophersen, PhD, a psychologist at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, recently wrote about the difference between having one kid and having two. Christophersen found that having one child often allowed mothers to retain part of their own lives, but that that became much harder after the second child. And actor Tamera Mowry provided first-hand experience when she discussed the additional challenges brought on by having a second child, describing the experience as being “in the trenches.”

What do you think — is having one child a way for parents to really have it all, to be a parent while still having a life?

In one year, California — already notorious for its climate altering stand-still traffic — added 39.3 million residents. 

The city of Los Angeles reached 4 million people and led the state with 12,224 new multi-family units. Hasan Ikhrata, executive director for the Southern California Association of Governments, sees trouble on the horizon. “What should be alarming to leaders is that our housing is not keeping up with the growth,” Ikhrata said. “We have one of the worst housing affordability rates in the country.” L.A. is becoming more crowded, with worse traffic and pollution, and less affordable housing. It’s time to rethink our parenting models so we can avoid situations like this.

A recent study by University of Southern California professor Ann Owens shows that families with children are driving economic segregation in the U.S. This is happening in large part because they flock to neighborhoods with the best schools, leaving less wealthy parents in sub-standard school districts. 

Owens says that “the increase in residential income segregation occurred entirely among families with children, for whom income segregation rose by about 20 percent.”

What’s the solution? According to Owens, possible solutions include more low-income housing and breaking the residential and school district link.

But what if we could start to break the inequality even earlier in the process? The fact is that all children deserve a fair start in life. The only way to give them that start is by shifting resources early on and focusing on equalizing the conditions in which they are born. Let’s start at the source. 

Colorado has made unique progress against teen pregnancy in the past few years. It’s mostly due to a cutting-edge program that provides long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), like IUDs, to teens and young women. That program has almost halved teen abortions in the state, according to the New York Times.

Having Kids is proud to have been part of the coalition of organizations that secured continued funding for this program in 2016, when Governor John Hickenlooper signed a state budget providing for an additional $2.5 million for the successful initiative. That amount will save the state the many more millions of dollars it would have spent on programs for teen mothers. It’s one of the best returns on investment any government can make.

Having Kids is also proud because LARC programming reflects the Having Kids model. The simple truth is that children should not be parents. In general, they cannot offer their kids the good parenting skills, well-being, and fair start in life all children deserve. As we move from a one-sided model focused on teen parent choice to a three-part model focused on the objective interests of parents, children, and the community, we’re also moving towards a better world. By helping teens wait to parent and engaging in good family planning, we’re benefiting everyone — not just kids and their parents.

As Zika Virus Controversy Continues, New Nonprofit Suggests World Leaders, Communities, and Families Change Views on Family Planning
Organization advocates for smaller families working together to plan a better future for every child.

(July 11, 2016) San Francisco —

In Latin America, there are now thousands of cases of babies being born with microcephaly, the debilitating neurological syndrome associated with the Zika virus.

Health officials are advising women to avoid pregnancy until the epidemic passes. There’s just one problem: many countries in this region do not ensure that women have sufficient access to contraception to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and abortion remains essentially illegal. This is not just an issue in Latin America, but is a concern for the United States as well. According to Paul Blumenthal, MD, Zika is expected to spread to Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, where reproductive health care is incredibly difficult to access, especially for low-income families. Zika has brought new urgency to the need to reform family planning systems. However, it raises the question: were we set up to fail in the face of a virus like Zika?

Decades before the Zika outbreak, world leaders came together to define certain fundamental human rights, including parenting rights. They created a rights-based parenting model that treated the choice to have children as one-sided, focused exclusively on parents and their isolated decision-making.

Carter Dillard, founder and president of Having Kids, believes there is a problem with this way of thinking. “We all know parenting cannot be one-sided, because seeing it that way ignores how government policies affect the decisions made by parents, the resources parents have access to and need to support a child, and most importantly, the interests of the children being born into this world and the communities those children are joining,  said Dillard.

According to Having Kids, this one-sided parenting model isolates families, and the cost becomes obvious when society needs to work together to help families delay or prevent pregnancy—as in Latin America or the US—and is unable to do so.

Dillard continues, “We need to think about having kids in terms of the minimum level of well-being each child deserves before being brought into the world, and how families, communities, and countries can work together to meet and raise that level.”

What is the solution? Having Kids suggests that world leaders, businesses, communities and families change the way they talk about human rights and family planning and move from a one-sided model that isolates parents to a three-sided model, which includes the interests of future children, parents, and the community in family planning decisions. It’s about smaller families working together to plan a better future for each child. Dillard concludes that this will “move us from “we can’t talk about this” to “how do we work together to solve this problem.”