English
English
Fair Start family planning means smaller families sharing resources to invest more in every child.
Communities ensure that parents have the resources to plan families and guarantee that all kids have the resources they need for a fair start in life. This transfer of resources acts as a constant and just gap-closer on inequality.
This enables would-be parents to delay having children until they are ready to have them, and choose to have smaller and more sustainable, empowered families that put less demand on our shared resources and our world.
When communities and parents work together to embrace policies that promote smaller and more equitable families, we can invest more in every child and create the future we all deserve. There is only one first principle – the human right to regenerative family planning that makes us free and equal people. There is only one form of fundamental change – investing more in those with whom our children will share the world in order to give everyone an ecologically and socially, or eco-social, #Fairstart in life.
The Fair Start Model moves family planning systems away from an exclusive focus on parents, towards a system that is inclusive of what children need. It is designed to take advantage of trends like falling fertility rates and delayed parenthood, and to balance five fundamental and widely shared values that together comprise the best conception of freedom and the foundation of human rights and democracy.
The Fair Start model is the best interpretation of the rights and responsibilities inherent in having kids. It replaces the dysfunctional parent-focused model created by governments to ensure population growth and evade collective responsibility to invest in kids. That growth, and dereliction of duty, is fundamentally driving the climate crisis, child poverty, economic inequity, and bloated democracies where the average voice does not matter. That growth happened in violation of basic standards of child welfare, like the Children’s Rights Convention, children’s right to a fair start in life, the protection of the ecologies we need to survive, and the obligation political systems have to preserve each person’s meaningful role in governance. The market values and demand that define our world today are not some naturally occurring phenomenon, but reflect a massive and subliterate world populace created in violation of human rights standards, through exploitation and inequity rather than collective investment in children to liberate them in a biodiverse and natural world.
There is no true form of inclusivity that does not involve child-centered family planning, and prioritizing the people who will actually comprise legitimate democracies. To be free we have to orient the constant and fundamental formation of power relations, in the act of having children, in a child-centric and fair way that maximizes relative self-determination for all. That is how we physically constitute systems of consensual governance, and especially for the majority of persons – those that will live in the future. Governance derives from people who derive from their creation; no just system is possible without a just creation norm. People who resist justice in creation are preconstitutional, or precons, and a barrier to freedom. We overcome them by using Fair Start family planning incentives/entitlements and the dominant human right to limit, decentralize and distribute power.
Specific, concrete, and enforceable standards for all three aspects of this Fair Start model are spelled out, in context, here.
It’s about people, not population. It’s about shared values and thinking qualitatively about the future, not using poor and unsustainable family planning to grow economies. Read the Allegory of the River, and why the Fair Start Movement talks about constituting democratic communities instead of framing our work around the concept of population, to understand more. Let’s make family planning truly inclusive, and geared around creating democratic communities where everyone has a voice.
For some, the closest analog for this new model would be responsible family planning incentives. But Fair Start resources are actually entitlements held by future children, and funded through non-traditional means. Those opposed to remodeling favor our current system of unsustainable families, unearned privileges, and undemocratic influence, over giving kids a fair start in life.
The Fair Start model addresses the biggest problems affecting kids such as poverty, inequality, and neglect. The model breaks down the barrier between family planning and child welfare, aligning need with resources.
The model links 1) where and when children enter the world, with 2) the provision of what those kids need for a fair start in life. In making that link the model has the greatest impact on child welfare, equality, animals and the environment – exponentially more impact than downstream approaches. In so doing the model corrects for cognitive dissonances – like the human tendency to focus on the immediate over the important – that prevent us from seeing that how we plan families, more than any other one thing, determines the quality of life on Earth.
By focusing our attention on future children the model temporalizes our thinking, allows us to plan ahead, requires us to cooperate, and thereby helps ensure the best outcomes. What’s a good analogy? In many ways our remodeling of family planning looks like the revision of the norms, in the late 20th Century, around using seat belts. Small improvements can lead to massive benefits. But does a new family planning model require top-down enforcement? No. Humans can internalize norms that maximize their autonomy, like norms around free speech that give everyone a voice, and that we voluntarily use in our lives every day. Over time we can also internalize ecologically and socially sustainable family planning.
We should ask whether the parents have the resources to care for the child, whether the community is supportive, and whether the environment can sustain the new life without compromising the future of others.
The Fair Start model is a novel and effective way to maximize values that everyone shares – like well-being, equality, continuity, nature, and democracy– by making a small change to the way we all think about bringing children into the world. Over time, small changes in the way we think and behave, like cooperatively devoting more to each child by creating smaller families, can produce big results. And things that at first seem limitations on personal choice – like time, place, and manner restrictions on free speech – can in fact enlarge liberty for all.
We believe that the Fair Start model may provide a pathway to creating a safe and healthy world that offers equal opportunities to everyone. For parents to get what they want, they will have to work together to ensure that every child born will pass through the vital array of resources necessary for their own personal development and so that they can have a positive impact on others. A model or suggested best practice, like the Fair Start model, is one way for parents to work together. The model helps parents ensure that their children have a fair shot at a great life by connecting the desire to provide for what kids need, with a cooperative model for when and how we plan to bring kids into the world.
We cannot seriously claim to love kids without investing in them, and we do that best by starting that process as the earliest stage possible with better, and truly human rights-based, family planning. Human rights are really about speaking truth to power, and the model acts by speaking the truth of shared values to the otherwise unfettered power parents would have over their future children.
Are there objective reasons for having children and how can parents use those reasons to work together to make a better future for all children? Could parents use shared or objective values like minimum levels of well-being, fairness, democracy, and nature to guide their decisions and work with others to ensure every parent has what children need in the long-term? For example, would-be parents could consider what they themselves would need and want as a child being born into this word, including what they would want the future of the world to look like in terms of the number, and cooperative or democratic capabilities, of the people in it. They would also consider what they would deserve, relative to other children being born at that time, in terms of birth conditions that ensure equal opportunities in life. Would-be parents would then work with other families and their community, who also have obligations to provide for children coming into this world, to cooperatively create those conditions and opportunities before having kids. In essence, this describes a process of give and take, where would-be parents give up some of the choice they would have under current family planning models in exchange for incentivizing resources other families and their community can provide. In practice, we believe the Fair Start model would look like smaller families and communities working together, by using excess community resources to incentivize improved birth and early childhood development conditions, to ensure a fair start in life for every child.
Yes. The Fair Start model replaces outdated parenting models that focus exclusively on the interests of parents, and do not consider the interests of future children and society. Each side of the model reflects fundamental values and rights, like parents’ interests in the continuity and improvement of life for humans, future children’s interest in minimum levels of well-being and equal opportunities in life, and society’s interest in both the organization of human thinking into functional democracies, as well as the absence of human power, or nature. These values and rights are more political than ethical, and all derive from the more ultimate value of freedom, conceived of as consensual political association. They are also constitutional, in the sense that they should guide the constant reconstituting of social organizations through the act of having children, and as such override other rights, interests, desires, etc. These five universal, objective, compatible, and interlocking values trump competing interests and guide how the model is applied.
Parents stand the best chance of giving their own children good lives and a better future by cooperating and coordinating their behavior with other parents. The model facilitates cooperation and thus serves parents’ own interests, protecting their child and getting them what they want – a better future for their kids. For example, under the Fair Start model, parents can set up incentive-based educational trusts, with part of the money they would have spent on having one extra child, to help other parents give their child more of a fair start in life. In addition to changing the benefits and burdens of having kids, the Fair Start model changes the weight of parents’ demand for resources to give their kid a fair start in life. Parents struggling socioeconomically and otherwise creates two classes of politically vulnerable or compromised persons, and that can undermine the way democracies function. Everyone has a weighty interest to avoid that, and assist parents to limit their vulnerability.
The Isolation family planning model focuses on what parents want in the short term rather than on what children and society need in the long term. It thereby breaks the link between vital needs and available resources. The isolation model developed into its current form in the middle of the 20th century with the emergence of a reproductive autonomy right that simplistically treated having kids and not having kids as equally private matters.
That right, and the isolation model it promoted, ignored the fact that having children is the most public thing most people will ever do and precluded collective action where it is needed most. It also disregarded the fact that children are born vulnerable to the people and conditions around them rather than being ensured a minimum level of well-being and a fair start in life. By treating having children as a private matter, it also eliminated the opportunity for parents to cooperate in their decision making to achieve the best outcomes for every child. This also ensured that often the most caring and thoughtful people would forgo having children in a largely vain (because of the lack of collective action) attempt to do things like protect the environment, other animals, and other people’s children.