What The World Needs Now
February 10, 2020With my head filled with Jackie DeShannon’s 60s lyrics, I posed this as a question on Instagram the other day. One of the responses I got knocked mea little. Having a page dedicated to childbirth education, celebrating motherhood and the wisdom of youth, I wasn’t expecting someone to reply: “Fewer people having babies.”
I mulled over this for two weeks, and two days ago the notion of people having fewer children came up again on my radar, this time via a friend on facebook commenting on a post entitled: “What if I told you that fewer births is a good thing.”
As a mother of three, I sat for a while and thought… Have I let the earth down? If I sat here today, without my children, would the world be a better place?
While I understand and agree with the logic that people having less children means less people, less consumption of precious resources and thus reduced stress on the environment, I think the discussion is missing an important consideration.
While fewer births will help reduce quantifiable figures. This isn’t the solution to a crisis of spirit.
In the 1800s the average America family had five children. Today it is two. China instituted its single child policy in the 1980s, which played out in years of forced sterilisations, abortions, traumatised women and a gender imbalance. Today, the following countries have declining population growth: Japan, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Venezuela.
If we look at not just these countries, but the dynamics of economies across the globe, having fewer children does not automatically lead to environmental and social consciousness or indeed stability. On the contrary, when reducing population growth is aggressively enforced, what we often see is the opposite. Children feeding into the capitalist dream, being given everything their parents could possibly give them, but missing out on the daily lessons of collaboration, cooperation, compromise and personal impact.
NOTE: I am absolutely not saying this is a single child issue. I don’t believe anything should be reduced to an either/or, good vs bad.
The feeling that has overwhelmed me for the last decade of motherhood, a feeling that has guided my work and the conversations I have with mothers is this:
We need a return to feeling connected. Not just to each other, but to the earth to which we are born. If each mother understands and nurtures this connection in awe and appreciation (both while the child is in utero and after birth), she cannot help but share it with the child/children she brings forth.
Those are children who grow understanding that the energy of nature and beauty around them is priceless.
Those are children who aren’t so easily sucked into the Mattel machine and more more MORE!
Those are children who know the value of not just a patch of real grass but the soil beneath it.
Those are children who understand that nourishing themselves healthfully requires nourishing the earth that feeds us.
Those are children who know that planting seeds in the soil and watching them grow produces a joy that is a feeling you cannot bottle.
It’s living. And when you know what it’s like to live, you value and love life around you. The blossom, the bee on it, the moon, the stars, the mud, the frogs… That is what we need. We need more children, connected to, and not just knowing, but feeling the value of this place we call home. We need mothers talking to their bumps and talking to their children and teaching them every day what we can do to honour this space and consider our place in it.
And we need mothers not doing it alone.
Telling people to have less children is not the simple solution in a global throwaway culture where the goal remains children grow up believing they’re entitled to (or need) supersized superfluous stuff. We need a supersizing of nourished souls. That’s a global resource we’ve sadly lost touch with. But I have hope. Hope that when we support this, responsible, accountable parenting is the sustainable outcome.
Having less children does not solve a crisis of caring. When we care what flows through us, and the impact it has, then emotional, social and environmental healing begins.
“The moment you understand the importance of loving yourself, you will stop hurting others”