Fair Start Movement

Tag: Opinions

  • Why Can’t We Prevent Horrific Child Abuse?

    Why Can’t We Prevent Horrific Child Abuse?

    These are just a few of the incidents of child abuse and neglect reported around the country in the past few weeks.

    How many more cases go undetected? The reality is that between 3-5 children die every day in the United States from neglect and abuse.

    It’s time to stop this. And the best way to do that is  by creating a culture, derived from smart policies, that prevents abusive and neglectful parent from ever having kids. It’s time to get proactive, rather than reactive.

    Who would oppose this? Lots of politicians and big businesses make money off of our current family planning system, which pushes as many kids as possible into the world because doing so ensures a growing supply of hungry consumers, and a future filled with cheap labor and lots of taxpayers. They are to blame, and should be held accountable.

    Having Kids is promoting fundamental change through our Fair Start order campaign. It’s simple: If you’ve been convicted of a serious case of child abuse and cannot care for children, you will be ordered not to have additional children until the situation changes.

    These orders are a fair and constitutional way to change the way we plan our families. It’s called the child-first Fair Start model. 

    Let’s get ahead of the problem. Take action now and support Fair Start order legislation in your state.

     

     

  • Bucking Tradition: Why One Family Chose To Stop At Two

    Bucking Tradition: Why One Family Chose To Stop At Two

    The Brenn family speaks out to protect their kids’ future, and stop at two. In their own words:

    “My husband and I both come from large families. The fact that we were ‘stopping at two’ still seemed an almost radical concept for many of our loved ones. This is why we’re speaking out. A smaller family really shouldn’t be a radical concept anymore.

    The decision to have ‘only’ two children was not one we took lightly.

    Our kiddos are fun, challenging, full of energy, and fill our lives with love and joy. Sure there are times (ok maybe once or twice) when we thought it would be fun to have a whole football team of kids. BUT…we want the best for them now and in their futures. That is one of the reasons we decided it was best for us to “stop at two”.

    We also want to give each of them the time, love, resources, and attention they need and deserve. Additionally, we want to have time and energy left over to invest in our art and our community as we try to make the world they will live in a better place. Most importantly, we are well aware that given current fertility rates, the world is on course to add BILLIONS more people to our planet! It’s hard to even imagine. Such an increase in population will exacerbate climate change, mass extinction of other species, acidification of the oceans, mounting social pressures and conflicts, etc. Naturally, we want to avoid that our children would live in such a world.

    So no… a smaller family should not be a radical concept.

    Our choosing a smaller family where we do as much as we can to help our kids become good people and part of a thriving community,  won’t be effective, however, if other parents aren’t willing to do the same.

    Parents need to work together to build the future their kids deserve. They can’t do it alone.”

    This is a simple fact: Better family planning, where smaller families invest more in each child, is the best way to help kids and protect the environment.

    Will you speak out? Contact us at Info@HavingKids.org if so.

  • Giving Tuesday: Why Donate to Having Kids?

    Giving Tuesday: Why Donate to Having Kids?

    You care about kids. You care about the environment. You care about equality. Why not do something to protect the things you care about, all at the same time?

    You can, simply by helping people work together and think ahead when it comes to planning their families.

    This is the Fair Start family planning model, and Having Kids is finding ways to build it into our legal, corporate, and cultural systems:

    • We all help parents wait, plan, and be ready before they have kids.
    • We also help them fight for the resources they need, and have a right to, to give their kids a fair start in life.
    • We ease this process by helping to promote smaller, cooperative and more equitable families.

    On this Giving Tuesday please consider what Having Kids does, and give what you can.

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  • 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.

     

  • Let’s All Look Out for the Children

    Let’s All Look Out for the Children

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    Look for advice on deciding whether to have a child and a theme will emerge: The articles are always written entirely from the perspective of the parent. The needs and interests of the future child are invisible.

    In some cases, we hear that kids are expensive, but those references are also written from the parents’ perspective. In other cases, parents will simply abandon the idea of considering a future child’s interests and embrace their own desires, even in pretty shocking circumstances or after significant reflection. This is surprising (to put it mildly), given the role this decision has on the environment in which all children will live.

    The parent-only perspective is understandable, however. Humans, as a group, are prone to many cognitive biases that determine how we plan families.

    Having Kids is focused on reversing this short-sighted and ultimately destructive bias. We are driving the change away from the view that family planning is a matter for parents and parents alone. We strive to reform family planning so that the future child emerges from invisibility and is part of the conversation.

    Share the story of how you included your child’s perspective in your decision-making process. You can help build a better future for all of us.

    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.

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  • Rethinking the Language of Family Planning

    Rethinking the Language of Family Planning

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    Writing for The Guardian, Andrew Solomon explores the need for a better vocabulary, one that adequately serves all families raising future generations.

    People apply this [traditional] vocabulary with a blunt literalism, asking adopted children about their “real parents”, in keeping with the presumption that nature consistently trumps nurture. . . . Explaining a wider distribution of responsibilities among biological and non-biological parenting figures carries the risk of similar ostracism. In our ecstatic embrace of the nuclear family, we are told that a child “needs” a mother and a father, and that it is problematical for a child to be “missing” one of those archetypal roles, or to look to more than two people for ultimate guidance and reassurance. We should also question the tyranny of biological relatedness. Why should we presume that children are better off with their biological parents than with anyone else? Some children have biological parents who do not love them or are not competent to raise them; that is an old problem.

    What if we expanded Solomon’s call to include family planning? What if the new language focused on what future children and the community needed in the long term, rather than what parents wanted in the short term?

    Under our current static, parent-centered model for family planning, parents talk about wanting a boy or girl, a third or fourth child, or siblings for their current child. What if our language instead encouraged us to name and personify future children even before they were conceived? What if the needs of these future children were the center of our conversations? What if we included the community those children would both affect and rely upon: their teachers, our neighbors, their friends, their ecosystem?

    Solomon is right that our language does not serve non-traditional families. But it also doesn’t serve future children and our communities, who remain invisible in common discussions of would-be parents. Let’s expand the scope to include a fair start for all children.

    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.

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  • Why Are We Pushing Women to Have Kids?

    Why Are We Pushing Women to Have Kids?

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    A recent article in The New York Times bemoans the fact that as a reaction to the economic downturn, Greek women are not having “enough” children. But isn’t financial insecurity a good reason to forgo having children? Doesn’t every child deserve to be born into a financially secure situation so they can have a fair start? The article raises those questions — and more.

    Why is a nation’s current population size the baseline to judge what its population should be? Most developed countries are already well over their carrying capacity.Why are all of the personal stories in the article about women? Sure, sales may be down at fertility clinics. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just one symptom of the inevitable hangover of the Ponzi scheme of growth economics.

    Fundamentally, isn’t having smaller families an easier and fairer solution?

    Greece could solve its demographic problems by relaxing immigration restrictions and accommodating the elderly back into the economy. That might be preferable to arguing that all women must be mothers and encouraging larger families in periods of economic instability.

    It is time to start thinking in terms of everyone’s well-being — including a fair start for all children — rather than mindlessly pursuing economic growth regardless of the consequences.

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  • Why We March: Having Kids at the Women’s March On Washington

    Why We March: Having Kids at the Women’s March On Washington

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    On January 21st, people and organizations from across the country will participate in the Women’s March on Washington to stand for women’s rights and reproductive rights and to protect our families and communities. Having Kids staff members and supporters will participate in both the core march in Washington, D.C., and in satellite marches in New York City and Trenton, New Jersey.

    Having Kids is marching for the future of our families, our communities, our children, and our planet. We believe that we all need to be intentional about the future that we want to create for future generations, and we need to make sure they have the resources they need and a healthy environment to have a better life than we did. However, this needs to be true for every child. We cannot be satisfied with the fact that most children born into this world will not have a high quality of life or even have their basic needs met. We need to create a community that cares about one another and sincerely wants to make life better for all.

    We also recognize that if we give people the tools to have smaller families—such as sex education, birth control, and access to reproductive health services—then they can ensure that more resources are available for each of their children to create this future. In fact, they might have more resources leftover to help other families that might be struggling.

    Having Kids believes that we need to look at things more holistically, and that we need to make sure that we have the ability to provide a healthy planet, safe communities, and the things children need to have a high quality of life. Next Saturday, we will march for these values and to protect the programs that help us move toward that future. Will you march with us?

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