View Full Version : Spinoff: Have you considered your family's carbon footprint in deciding how big?
YourMom
11-21-2007, 07:11 AM
Was the environment a factor in how many children you had? Did anybody stop before they were "done" because they worried about population growth?
Anybody considered adoption in part because of this?
No. I considered my sanity first. I wish we could have had one more. But we just can't handle it. I am sure if we did have another one, we would figure it out. But hopefully we won't have to do that.
We have talked about adoption in the future if we feel we really do want a 4th but it has nothing to do with carbon footprints.
Maleah
11-21-2007, 08:20 AM
Nope. But I am trying to raise our kids to be enviormentally aware.
As far as adoption goes, I don't think I have it in me to adopt. We've talked about it and maybe when we're empty nesters we'll do the foster parent/adoption thing.
No, in England the fertility rate has dropped signficantly below the rate of replacement in recent decades and is in continuing decline, international adoption is near on impossible for all but the upper middle classes in England (we did look into it when we were told we couldn't have a second child and it largely concerned us needing to buy a home twice the size of the one we currently have, almost double our income and age around 15-20 years- that was just for internal adoption within Britain, foreign adoption ran into near on six figures from beginning to end.)
I am raising my children highly ecologically aware, i feel due to the fact we are a larger family and we have budget restraints we make a huge effort to negate the impact we have upon the world- hopefully being raised with this ethic my 4 children will continue on to be ecologically aware adults and continue to raise their own families in this manner.
In our home everything has to be used to it's maximum capacity, every light that is on functions for more than one person, every television set is watched by several people, we do without many of the labour saving electrical devices that smaller families often see as essential. We don't buy as many clothes, we don't run a car, we don't fly (next year infact we'll take our first ever flight as a family and even then it's because we're being forced to by family with no/maximum of 1 child in their families) Shoes are used til they are outgrown and have had good use.
Yes my children are using up resources but they're using up less than many of the children i know in smaller households - mostly out of financial necessity. Chase's best friend comes from a 1 child household, their home has more than twice the footage ours does, they run 2 high power cars to our none, they take at least 2 international flights a year, each bedroom and both their lounge and kitchen have televisions, they have a dishwasher and clothes dryer- all things DD1's bestfriend (as lovely as she and her family are) sees as "essential" and will continue to do into her adult life. Very often her mother complains of throwing out clothes and shoes that have hardly had any use because with just one child they do often over buy purely for aesthetics.
So no, i didn't limit my family size due to environmental impact but I have taught them how to live as carbon neutral as they can knowing we are a larger family- when we do carbon footprint calculators my entire household usually comes up around 1/3rd of British national average (which is alot lower that American national average) in fact they last "if all people lived like you we would need X planets" quiz here at Spiffy my household came up as one of the few where only 1 planet would be needed despite the fact I have one of the largest families here (several others have 4 i know but I can't think of many posters who have more, only 1 or 2).
International adoption was frankly beyond our financial means and would have been even if we'd have stuck at one or even no children before considering it.
Beka-you don't have kids in foster care that could be adopted? We have so many here but they are overlooked because of their age. People want babies.
Not really. I know that we'd both prefer not to have more kids than we could fit in our station wagon, because we really don't want to have to buy an SUV or minivan, but beyond that, we have no desire to have so many kids that we'd actually be worried about environmental impact.
I think larger trends are more important than individual family size choices. If it were common in our society for most people to have 10 kids, then I would think people should consider limiting family size. But, as long as most people are having smaller families, I think people can make the choice to have larger families without any problems, which is a good thing.
Yes Jo, there are kids in foster care here, however when we were told we couldn't have Jude we were age 23 and when we looked into adoption we were told they preferred a minimum gap of 30 years between parent and child, there are also very strict requirements on necessary housing size to be permitted to foster here in England, again this would have made it a financial impossibility at that point in time (and even now 5 years later even, we're probably at least a decade from home ownership) Also we very much wanted a second child, a second permanent member of our family. Fostering would have meant a child who could (and most likely would) be taken away from us, which in all honesty we could not have handled, ourselves, and Chase for that matter, had already been through enough in trying for a second baby without facing welcoming a new person into our family only to have them eventually rehomed elsewhere.
Kristen
11-21-2007, 11:17 AM
Nope. There are so many people who are choosing to be childless and so many people with families smaller than mine, our four kids don't worry me in the slightest.
We'll raise them to be good stewards of the earth, of course, but environmental considerations weren't at all a part of our decision to stop having children.
Like Beka and a lot of other large families, we don't have a bunch of money, and so out of necessity, we live in a way that is more earth friendly than a lot of people who have few kids or no kids.
Quite honestly, which is more earth friendly...my neighbor who is single and heats and cools an entire house for himself, who drives to and from work every day to support himself, and who owns a swimming pool or the six of us, who live under one roof? One person commutes out of our house and he supports six people. I line-dry laundry, we have CFL's everywhere, we wash laundry in cold, we use cloth bags for groceries, we never fly anywhere, etc, etc. I'd honestly be surprised if our carbon footprint was bigger than his.
Christine
11-21-2007, 03:04 PM
It wasn't at all a factor in our decision to have more children. Actually, we didn't consider having half of our children at all! :giggle
I do teach my children to be environmentally aware, though, and feel that's important.
gr8mommy
11-22-2007, 07:57 AM
No, but that's mostly because I don't think that humans have nearly the effect on the climate shift as some would have us believe.
No, it never crossed my mind.