Category: Responsible Parenting & Smaller Families

If you listen to conversations the people around you are having about choosing to have children, you might notice strangely conflicting advice. You’ll constantly hear that having kids is the most important decision a person can make in life, with lots of people lining up to give advice about how to decide. But at the same time—and from the same people—you’ll also hear that the decision is personal, and that each person alone will know the right time to have kids, the number of kids to have, and the reasons for having those kids.

How can both be true? How would anyone know that the decision to have children is an important one, for someone else, if the decision were truly personal or private to each person? The truth is that the decision to have kids is more interpersonal than personal, and that it involves factors we can all collectively see and consider: the time and other resources required from us, the impact the world around us will have on our children, the impact those children will have on the world, and more. In other words, when a couple chooses to save money before they have a child so they can pay for his or her basic needs, they are making that decision not because it is right for them, but because it is right, plain and simple.

Yet we continue to hear incomprehensible statements like this: “It’s the single biggest life decision a person will make.” . . . “But ultimately, it’s a leap of faith.”

So why do we talk about the decision to have kids as subjective and personal? The little-known fact is that there is a narrative around parenting as personal and subjective (something we at Having Kids call the “isolation model”), which has become almost universal. The isolation model was intentionally created and propagated between the middle and end of the twentieth century by many governments around the world who, working through the United Nations, were trying to improve family planning. However, the process involved several critical mistakes. These mistakes resulted in the peculiar claim—still promoted by the United Nations and almost all of the major foundations and nonprofits engaged in providing family planning services—that family planning and parenting decisions are only subjective and personal.

There are several costs of this narrative and of the isolation model. Here are a few:

• Demands for family planning services (like access to contraception and abortions) become easily dismissed because they are based on personal or private reasons, rather than the weighty and widely held (or objective) values like being able to adequately take care of a child or concern about further degrading our polluted environment.
• Couples around the world are told it’s their personal choice to have children, but in patriarchal parts of the world where husbands make household decisions, women are frequently turned into into involuntary mothers for most of their lives.
• Parents are dissuaded from working together to ensure that the resources children need are actually there for them, as the subjective isolation model separates families into spheres of personal decision-making and helps them ignore objective values.
• Democracies, which were premised on citizens entering their political systems as free and equal people, fail as some children enter the world with massive resources while others enter with virtually nothing. They are neither free nor equal in a meaningful sense of the words.
• Families in communities are seen as isolated, and there are no incentives to help one another and support children throughout the community.

Many of the problems in the world today—from inequality to poverty to the degradation of the world environment—could have been mitigated had governments not created and left prospective parents adrift in the fog of confusion that is the isolation model. But it’s not too late to change models. One simple alternative to the isolation model is to broaden our perspective to include the needs—needs we can all see and understand—of parents, future children, and the community.

Trying to decide whether to have a child? Consider what you would have wanted to have coming into the world. Consider whether you would want a fair start in life relative to other children in your generation. Consider what your community might look like in 25 years if the parents in that community worked together to plan and provide or the children they would have. Consider the natural environment your child and other children and the animals they will come to love will need in 100 years to thrive, and the impact the decision to have those children will have on that environment and those animals.

The decision to have kids is truly an important one, and worth working together on. Welcome to the Having Kids model. Welcome to a better future.

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.