Fair Start Movement

Tag: Corporate & Political Accountability

  • The Royals: Will they be more like Trump, or Thoreau?

    The Royals: Will they be more like Trump, or Thoreau?

    The Royals: Will they be more like Trump, or Thoreau?

    Recently Having Kids wrote an open letter to Prince William and Kate Middleton asking them to consider adopting the Fair Start model. Among other things, we noted a simple fact based on math and exponential growth: Large families of three or more children are not sustainable. Three kids each have three kids, each have three kids, each … you get the picture. It evoked a powerful response from some: “Mind your own business – it’s a matter of personal freedom.” Lessons learned (apart from the fact than many parents are really angry and openly racist): A lot of people think about freedom the way Trump does. For them personal freedom includes the right to harm others – to degrade our environment, to endanger our own children’s future, to exacerbate inequality, etc. Trump’s version of freedom is doing whatever he wants to do – like a petulant and greedy child.

    Instead, Thoreau’s version of freedom was transcendent, like a child being emancipated into adulthood, or the becoming of someone with a deep empathy, who therefore wanted to and was able to control his behavior so as not to harm others.

    Why do these different versions of freedom matter? It’s very important that we use the right version of freedom when we think about family planning.

    Remember the story of the social contract, the historical basis for many modern systems of human rights and democracy? In essence, the story justifies today’s systems of government by treating them as the product of free and equal people voluntarily or consensually coming together to make the rules they will live by. The story tried to maximize human freedom. But – and this is crucial – that story relied upon people who were able to control their behavior so as not to harm others. In other words, people who were more like Thoreau than Trump, or Trump’s followers. How do we make sure future generations actually do grow up, and are more like Thoreau than Trump?

    What if rather than thinking of the social contract as something that happens at a particular point in time, we instead temporalized the process to account for how we “come together” with future generations? Incoming generations might demand some minimum level of well-being at entry that would be consistent with child welfare laws and the Children’s Rights Convention, as well as a fair start relative to other incoming children. Extant members of democracies would also want to consent to incoming generations, their new fellow citizens, which would give a powerful reason for them to invest heavily in the development of those generations as democratic co-rulers. All persons would want, in the process of bringing in future generations, to preserve nature so that humans would be able to consent to coming together. In other words, so that there would be places, states of nature, or neutral political positions from which to consensually come together and to which persons could withdraw. Finally, in this process would-be parents would want to be assured a right to have children, and the help they need to give their kids a fair start, and a better life.

    Our current family planning models do nothing to assure these things, and help us become emancipated or free. The Fair Start model does. Lessons learned? It’s time, more now than ever, to rethink the way we plan families.

     

    [button link=”https://fairstartmovement.org/faqs/”] More about freedom in family planning [/button]

  • Why Write the Royals? A Thinking Person’s Guide to Family Planning

    Why Write the Royals? A Thinking Person’s Guide to Family Planning

    Having Kids recently wrote an open letter to Prince William and Kate Middleton to ask them to consider the Fair Start model in deciding whether to have more kids. The reaction of many proves that we need a public discussion of family planning, and we need it now.

    Much of the reaction to our letter fell into these categories:  

    1) Racist and eugenicist rants about why white and wealthy couples should have lots of kids to compete with birth rates in parts of the Southern Hemisphere. It’s hard to think of a more immoral or lose-lose proposition.

    2) Commentators who think royal family size shouldn’t be of interest to those from other countries. This ignores the global nature of climate change, which does not recognize antiquated national borders. Having Kids has been vocal against Mr. Trump, father of five, on these issues. And our points are equally and obviously applicable to any public figure – wherever they may be – pushing unsustainable families. It’s cognitive dissonance to say that choices which so profoundly affect our world are none of our business.

    3) Bloggers who seem creepily obsessed with celebrity babies, and who would subject the rest of us and our kids to a hotter and more crowded world so they can gawk at other people’s newborns. This seems almost too hard to believe, which explains why the blogs are sponsored by companies that sell baby products. These bloggers will have to tell their children, on one of the hotter days in the future, that they were more interested in the royal offsprings’ clothing than the degradation of the world’s atmosphere.

    4) Some asked why we didn’t write to enormous and less admirable families like the Duggars? The simple answer is that we did. But given the massive swings in population that even small changes to a typical worldwide fertility rate of 2.5 would create, the question of role modeling is best raised in the context of couples considering a second or third child rather than marginal families like the Duggars.

    5) Those who feel the right to have children is totally unlimited, and should not be publicly discussed. The fact is that bioethicists and legal scholars have obliterated all arguments for such a right, and instead shown that the right to have children is more akin to the right to speak freely, which is limited in a way that protects others’ rights. Governments have simply not acted because they benefit from growth, and continue to shuffle the problem off on future generations.

    At the core of the responses, however, was this message: Focus instead on would-be parents who won’t be able to give their kids a fair start in life. That is exactly our point.

    Within our current family planning models, there is no medium in which to have this discussion. Prince William and Kate can’t tell massive and irresponsible families to act responsibly while they ratchet up their family size, claiming their right to do so as a matter of personal privacy. We need a child-centered model that focuses on what all children need, as well as what parents want. We need publicly influential people to break the taboo, step forward and say “I gave my kid a great start in life and tried to protect their future and environment. For my own and your kids’ benefit, I want to help you do the same.”

    That is why we wrote to Prince William and Kate. Their leadership could be an effective way to build a better future by breaking the taboo and setting a new and crucial trend of public family planning. They can break that which keeps us paralyzed in the face of threats like climate change. That is what our letter asked them to consider. It’s not about altruism or charity. It’s about working together to help the actual people who will comprise the future, our future. Many in the past have given their lives to protect this world from various threats. The least we can do is plan our families in a responsible and sustainable manner.

    Our environment is degrading, the gap between rich and poor widens, and children are being born into worlds of unfathomable suffering. We can find the cause in large part in a family planning model that privatizes having kids and prevents vital social cooperation.. Having Kids asks you to change this, and join the discussion about child-centered family planning at Havingkids.org

  • Why This Royal Couple?

    Why This Royal Couple?

    Many supporters have questioned why Having Kids wrote to the royal couple Prince William and Kate Middleton to ask that they publicly choose a smaller and more sustainable family. We also requested that they use their public choice as an opportunity to encourage and help other families give their own children a fairer start in life. Our supporters have wondered whether a larger royal family is really the problem and whether our efforts would be better directed towards regions with higher birth rates and levels of infant mortality.

    Having Kids is focusing on the royal family because:

    1. Given their public stature, they can lead by example to impact family planning decisions around the world.
    2. The impact the wealthiest families have on the environment dwarfs the impact of children born in the developing world.
    3. Given exponential growth, large families – wherever they may be – are simply not sustainable.
    4. The royal family has the resources to cooperatively incentivize other families to plan a fairer start for their own children.  

    The most important part of our ask, however, is for the couple to engage in a child-centered form of family-planning based on objective values. None of us can continue to embrace the unsustainable, subjective, and parent-centered model, which has created the troubled world we live in today. If every one of us were to choose a smaller family, and to also work with other families to plan a fair start in life for their children, the world would be a much better place. We owe it to our children to make that change.

    And the best way to do that is by working together, agreeing that: “If you plan a smaller family with more investment in each child, we’ll do the same. We’ll also help each other whenever we can.” That is the Fair Start model.

    At Having Kids:

    We promote and protect every child’s right to a fair start in life by replacing unsustainable, parent-centered family planning models with the human rights-based and child-centered Fair Start family planning model. The model suggests a shift in family planning from a subjective focus on just the parents, to an objective focus that considers the interests of the potential child, the parents, and the community.

    It’s all about this: Smaller families working together to give every child a fair start in life.

    Today many families are adopting the Fair Start family planning model. First, they try to give their child a fair start in life by having a smaller family where they can invest more in their child. Often they also foster or adopt one of the many children eagerly waiting for parents rather than creating additional need. Second, they publicly role model their choices. Finally, these families join public advocacy campaigns to shift resources from extractive centers of power like governments, corporations, and wealthy families in order to democratically empower children and future citizens by incentivizing better family planning by all parents. Why? All parents know that the quality of their own child’s life will depend on how other parents decide to have and raise their kids.

     

  • Kim Kardashian: Having Two Kids Is Like Having Twenty

    Kim Kardashian: Having Two Kids Is Like Having Twenty

    [et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Post Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]

    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.

     

    [/et_pb_text][et_pb_cta admin_label=”Action Button” button_url=”https://fairstartmovement.org/having-kids-is-different/” url_new_window=”off” button_text=”Learn How” use_background_color=”off” background_color=”#18aacc” background_layout=”dark” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid” custom_button=”on” button_letter_spacing=”0″ button_use_icon=”on” button_icon_placement=”right” button_on_hover=”on” button_letter_spacing_hover=”0″ saved_tabs=”all” button_bg_color=”#ea593c” button_border_color=”#ffac9b” button_font=”|||on|” button_icon=”%%20%%” button_bg_color_hover=”rgba(234,89,60,0.8)”] [/et_pb_cta][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]