Category: Responsible Parenting & Smaller Families

BY RUBY FOX

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.

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

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.

That’s the message in a new peer-reviewed book, containing articles originally published by Yale, Duke, Northwestern and other university, by folks at the Fair Start Movement. As the book details, the way we think about having kids is the product of a power grab by elites in the Twentieth Century who wanted to evade their collective obligations to invest more in kids. This fact is indisputable: Those who designed our family planning systems 1) created something unsustainable, that 2) benefitted those in power and 3) hurt the most vulnerable.

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.

Making the fair start change means moving from family planning policies focused on the unsustainable growth big business wants, to a universal child-centric Fair Start model focused on parental readiness, leveling the field between rich and poor kids, and promoting more sustainable families for all. That is the most effective solution to the crises we face today, from the climate to inequity, and starting from a just place frees us.

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.

3. Finally, please urge any groups you support or work with to join our call for mandatory population policy disclosures. 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.

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 book was recently recommended reading by a leading constitutional scholar.

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.

The move to take those resources, and ensure birth equity, exposes a new border war between free people, and preconstitutional people or “precons” who refuse to collectively constitute free and just societies, and thus threaten our kids’ future.

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.

Order your copy today, and join the fight for true justice.

1. Concentrations of wealth and power only exist because world leaders chose isolation family planning systems meant to avoid collective obligations to protect future generations. This fundamentally created every crisis, from the climate to massive inequity, we face today.
2. The right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, obligating us to target those concentrations – and people like Ivanka Trump and other wealthy families like the Raymonds – to limit and decentralize their power and pay what they owe. They benefited from, and furthered, a lie at the heart of our systems of human rights and democracy.  They are at the heart of the power grab. Government and all political obligations derive from people, who derive from their creation. The duty to ensure a Fair Start in life – the god norm – overrides all other rules, like the property rights that empower people like Ivanka. Fair Start is promoting a process called the Tell the Truth campaign, under federal law, to require disclosures of who played what role – and what role they plan on playing – in creating the crises we face today.
3. 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.

As Afghanistan descends into a human rights catastrophe, we should look for the mistakes that created the crisis and learn from them. Afghanistan has had one of the highest birthrates in the world, driven by a dominant patriarchy.

Given this, did the United Nations intervene decades ago to protect women and children through aggressive family planning programming meant to ensure compliance with the Children’s Rights Convention, and to free women from the structure that treated them primarily as mothers? It did not, instead choosing to embrace the isolation modeling that treats the act of having children as as something left to the subjective whims of the parents, and nobody else’s business.

This was a major missed opportunity, laying the foundation for the birth and development of a ballooning number of children in conditions that would ensure the chaos we see today. In creating its system, the UN bent to pressure from male-dominated members – including the United States – who saw population growth as an easy way to create economic growth.

Both involve the exploitation of vulnerable entities – women, future children, and the nonhuman world – to empower men. The story of Afghanistan is the story of ignoring the impact of massive family size, abysmal child welfare, vast inequity, and the failure to prepare children as effective members of democracies.

Eerily, it finds echoes in the patriarchy here in the United States eagerly pushing women to have more and more kids.

What’s the solution? Had the United Nations adopted and implemented the correct interpretation of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to found a family, which treats the provision as the dominant human right and child-centric in nature (focused on the most vulnerable entities, and those with the most at stake), this situation could have been avoided.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the United Nations to change course and stop creating nightmares like what we are seeing in Afghanistan.

 

This past Fourth of July, two everyday people Cassie and Matt – exemplified what it would mean to constitute communities that are actually free, in part by compensating future generations for the harm we have caused them through the climate, inequity and other ecosocial crises.

They are living the truth that justice for future generations overrides all other obligations, including property rights. Older generations lied about the “private” nature of family planning to protect concentrations of wealth and power from distributive obligations to future generations. That lie is fundamentally blocking justice.

Listen to this brief podcast to understand why.

Cassie, an activist and nonprofit professional said this about family planning:

Current corrupt concentrations of power push a growth model that promotes unsustainable family planning policies. They see us ordinary people as economic inputs in their machine, to use for our reproductive and other labor. It’s our job to fight that narrative and elevate the worth of every individual to have their basic needs met, on day one. My partner and I hope to adopt children one day and I feel the urgency to ensure that my future child, and all children, have the resources and opportunities that are their right.

Matt, a donor to the Fair Start Movement, said this:

I support the Fair Start Movement because I know that any claims I have to property and wealth are subject to ensuring every child a fair and equitable start in life, the first and overriding human right. I’m willing to step forward, as a donor, and say that. I challenge others to do the same.

Together, they are exemplifying a real new deal, one that fixes the fundamental source of the biggest problems in the world today, and leads to a comprehensively liberated state of affairs. It’s not about population. It’s about people, the vast majority of people, who will exist in the future. It’s about putting their interests first. And if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for a child. Government derives from the people which derive from their creation. A just creation norm thus precedes and overrides everything else, including the government assigned property rights that have created massive power differentials between rich and poor.

We can spread this modeling, and this simple discourse: “Part of your wealth is my and my future child’s family planning entitlement and incentive.

TAKE ACTION:

1. Do you feel your child or future child deserves a level playing field and equal opportunities in life, relative to wealthy children – the many  millionaire and billionaire kids who will impact your child’s life?
2. What if your child or future child had a human right to that fair start ? Would you advocate for policies, and direct action, to ensure that right?
3. If you are someone with wealth, would you be willing to speak out in support of that right and those policies?

Can you help us find groups of people to enlarge the discourse that future children’s right to an ecosocial Fair Start in life overrides property rights, and necessitates distribution that will incentivize the most comprehensive and effective solution to the crises we face – Fair Start family planning?

Urge those you know who are willing to step forward and say this to contact Ashley Berke at Ashley@fairstartmovement.org

Kudos to Fair Start Movement coalition member, Population Matters for bringing attention to the topic of sustainable families. The group awarded $695 to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to be gifted to the charity of their choice, for making the decision to limit their family to two kids. The award, which is garnering headlines and serving to break the taboo, was timed to coincide with the U.N.’s World Population Day.

Prince Harry revealed the couple’s plans to limit their family size due to environmental concerns back in 2019. Earlier that year we wrote to Megan as well, urging the couple to serve as role models and incorporate sustainability into family planning. It took courage for them to make that statement and it likely would not have happened without the great teamwork and encouragement from Population Matters and Jane Goodall. 

Despite the endless supply of alarmist stories about declining birthrates, cultural perspectives are beginning to shift and recognize the numerous social and emotional benefits of choosing to have only one or two kids. Choosing a smaller family is also the most effective way to reduce climate impact. 

The environmental impact of smaller families:

• 20 TIMES: Having a smaller family is 20 times more effective at reducing climate impact than changing diet or forms of transportation. Learn more about climate impact and family size. 
  
• BILLIONS: By 2100 world population could vary by billions of people, depending on whether the average woman in the world today has one child more or one child fewer in her lifetime. 
  
• 1 MILLION SPECIES face extinction thanks to population growth-driven human activity, the U.N. reports.
  
• Child-first family planning provides a clear human rights-based solution and path forward. It’s sustainable and equitable, and reflected in the worldwide trend towards smaller families that can invest more in each child and ensure a safer future.

It’s time for more environmental organizations to inspire eco-conscious parents to choose to have smaller families to reduce human impact on animals and the planet.

Take Action: Share this headline with your favorite animal and environmental organizations, and urge them to follow suit in promoting more sustainable families. 

Tweet:

• Carter Roberts, @Carter_Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund
• Annie Leonard, @AnnieMLeonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA
• Michael Brune, @bruneski, executive director of the Sierra Club
and ask them to take a stand on the most effective way to protect our future: policies that promote sustainable and equitable family planning.