Fair Start Movement

Category: Responsible Parenting & Smaller Families

Family Planning in Indonesia: A Model for the World
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Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) announced that he will revive Indonesia’s family planning program, which previous presidents have not prioritized. President Jokowi sees this as a strategic investment that will:

Help families save more overall

Provide parents access to higher incomes

Reduce maternal and child mortality

Reduce poverty

Provide more opportunities, such as education and employment, for the children who are born under these policies

Having Kids believes that policies like these should be implemented around the world. In doing so, we could ensure that children being born into this world are given a high quality of life and are born into conditions in which they can thrive. If families cannot plan when they have kids, society and families alike to often find it challenging to devote the amount of resources necessary to each child to ensure their success. Addressing these issues now can provide a sound future for children who have not yet been born. The Having Kids model can ensure this sound future by helping families invest more resources in each child.
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April 5, 2016
How Can We Follow in Iran’s Footsteps?
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How do you bring a country’s total fertility rate from 6 to 2.1 children in 20 years? Iran had the answer, and it included education, free contraception, and accessible healthcare clinics for rural and urban areas. In 1970, Iran launched a family planning initiative that had three goals:

Delay a family’s first pregnancy.

Allow more space between births.

Promote smaller families.

Using these tactics, Iran knew could it reduce maternal and child mortality and ensure that families planned for children that they could support. Overall, the program was incredibly successful because sex education was provided broadly to youth, a variety of contraceptives were offered for free, health clinics were established, and there was a cultural shift to accept these family planning tools. In the end, families could plan for the children they wanted to have, and they could ensure that they would have the resources to support those children fully.

However, a few years ago Iran cut their family program, outlawed vasectomies, and created public ad campaigns encouraging couples to have large families. Many groups and individuals are concerned that this will result in a significant increase in unplanned pregnancies, an increase in sexually transmitted infections, a decrease in girls and women pursuing higher education, and fewer families having the means to fully support their offspring. Having Kids believes that this is a turn in the wrong direction and will make it harder for families and the country to support the children who will be born under this policy.
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March 8, 2016
The Benefits of Small Families

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A recent article detailed many obvious and irrefutable benefits to having fewer kids: parents who are able to spend more time with each child, less competition for resources among children, more free time for parents, savings of close to a quarter of a million dollars per child (the average cost of raising a child in the United States), and children who are statistically likely to become more independent. Curiously, though, the article concludes like this: “Remember, the argument about one child vs. many children all boils down to personal priorities and preferences.”

But is that true? Shouldn’t it matter to all of us whether the world is overcrowded, whether the environment is degraded, and whether parents are investing enough in each child to help them lead good lives and get along with others? At Having Kids, we believe that parenting decisions are more than personal and that we can work together to create a better world.

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February 29, 2016
Can Sub-Replacement Fertility Work? Just Ask Japan.

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Japan now has a “birthrate czar,” Katsunobu Kato, who is tasked with urging women to become pregnant to stabilize Japan’s population at about 100 million as it falls from a current ~125 million. In 2015, Kato oversaw about 32 billion dollars of public funding to stabilize the birthrate at a sub-replacement level of 1.8 children per woman, using a variety of interventions. According to Kato, the government envisions a less populous Japan, but one where “all Japanese people and people of all ages and sexes–including those who have failed… can dream and hope to create a society heading forward.”

Some are asking why Japan is investing so much in creating additional people rather than investing in the children and adults that are there now. When pressed, Kato cited economic growth rates as the reason for massive investment. But are there values other than economic growth rates that should also be considered? What about restoring the nonhuman world, investing more individualized attention in each child, and creating communities small enough and with enough in common for people to feel connected to one another? That sounds good to us.

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February 23, 2016
Kim Kardashian: Having Two Kids Is Like Having Twenty

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Kim Kardashian recently took to her blog to reveal what having two kids is really like.

“My mom would always say, about having kids: ‘One is like one, and two are like twenty.’ I never really understood that until now.”

It’s not just the demands of a newborn that are keeping Kim up at night. “Every waking second that I’m not with the baby, I’m with North,” she adds of her two-year-old daughter North. “I actually think the harder parts aren’t with the newborn but with the toddler! I feel like I go into overdrive to give my daughter attention and make her feel loved.”

All parents want to give their children the love and attention they need to grow into happy, successful adults. The Having Kids model can help ensure that all parents have the resources to do that.

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February 22, 2016
Erica Gies Is Not Having Kids

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Erica Gies writes passionately and persuasively about her decision not to have children for ethical reasons. Erica explains:

In his classic treatise ‘On Liberty,’ John Stuart Mill argued that your right to do what you want ends at the point at which it infringes on someone else’s rights. I’d argue that, given our extreme population, having more than two kids, the replacement level for a couple, is impinging upon other people’s liberty by using their share of resources. Still, government incentives are skewed, offering tax credits for reproduction, thereby penalizing people without kids. That needs to change.

People without biological kids can still give to the next generation. Adoption provides desperately needed love and stability to a child who’s already here. I was adopted, as were two of my nephews. And in recent years, I have become a stepmother to two smart, warm, fun kids. It’s a role both enlightening and challenging, pushing me to grow as I strive to be a positive influence in their lives.

When I consider their future and the healthy planet they need to thrive, I hope that we will continue to move toward greater social acceptance of being childfree, better government policies, and more widespread education for women as a soft path to reducing our numbers. For optimal quality of life, we need fewer of us.

But is it enough for people like Erica to individually consider the ethics of having kids and to take action? Or to have a real impact do we have to do it all together, collectively, as a society?

At Having Kids, we promote a model for parenting that addresses these questions collectively to be as fair and effective as possible.

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February 4, 2016
Large Families, Explosive Growth
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“It’s a small world.”

A video on population growth from worldpopulationhistory.org gives the old expression new meaning. Here are the facts:

In just about 200 years, the global population exploded from roughly 900 million people to more than 7.3 billion.

We are headed towards roughly 10 billion.

But this trend of explosive growth is changing. Parents are choosing smaller families, and they’re investing more in each child. We can accelerate that trend, improve children’s well-being and equality of opportunity, and restore our environment and democracies, simply by working together.
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February 3, 2016
Having Kids in the New York Times: The Zika Virus and Family Planning

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Piper Hoffman, Having Kids’ executive director, has a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times on the Zika virus and family planning. Hoffman writes in response to a NYT article about El Salvador health officials advising women not to get pregnant until 2018 to avoid infant brain damage caused by the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Here’s her letter in its entirety:

One theme is clear in “El Salvador’s Advice on Zika Virus: Don’t Have Babies” (front page, Jan. 26). El Salvador’s advice that women should abstain from pregnancy for two years to avoid having children born with microcephaly, a rare condition in which babies have unusually small heads, is shocking.

But isn’t it more shocking to feel compelled to have children in the face of a growing mosquito-borne epidemic likely to cause them severe brain damage? The surprise in your article stems from historical parenting models that discourage parents from working together to maximize the well-being of future generations by deciding when and how to bring them into this world.

If we care about children, we’ll move away from these models. Supporting El Salvador’s move to work collectively to avoid severe brain damage in children would be a start.

This is what Having Kids is all about: thinking critically about how and when to have children and how to best support the children we do have. El Salvador’s family planning approach moves from a one-sided perspective on parenting (based solely on parental desire) to a three-sided perspective that also includes the future child’s wellbeing and the family’s impact on others. The outraged reaction among rights groups over what was advice from the government, not a mandate, highlights just how ingrained the traditional parenting model is.

We can change that.

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January 28, 2016
What Does Having Kids Mean by Improved Continuity?

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Q: Having Kids refers to improved continuity as the objective value at the heart of the Having Kids model. What does that mean?

A: One of the problems with current parenting models is that they provide no objective value on which to base the decision to have a child. As such, they don’t provide common ground for parents to work together, collectively, to make the best parenting decisions possible. The Having Kids model starts with the most basic human value—the desire for our lives to continue and improve, i.e. improved continuity—and applies it to parenting.

With improved continuity at the core of our decision-making, the reasons we have children change. Following traditional parenting models, parents might validate their decision to have four children by saying that they “value the feeling of a large family” or they “want a child of a certain gender.” With improved continuity at the core, parents will invest more in their first and/or second child to make those children’s lives better than their own lives. And it encourages parents to invest in the first and/or second child of parents in need to help them achieve improved continuity for their own children.

Doing so would improve all children’s lives, give them common ground, and help them eventually work together to shape the best future possible. It would also fulfill what matters most—objectively—to parents: the continuation and improvement of their lives through their children. Improved continuity: It’s part of the Having Kids model of smaller families working together to invest more in each child.

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January 26, 2016