Solutions for Volunteer Population Reduction

My project is to address the need for population balancing and more deliberate choices about bringing children into the world with intrinsic motivation, not coercion.

I have five rudimentary ideas at this point to solve problems that people feel:

 

 1. Advocates of lowering population, when trying to get people to have fewer or no children, are met with hostility and indifference. The advocates feel ignored, left out and hurt.
 
 

Solution: “child-pooling.”  A matchmaking service that pairs childless people with parents. Let childless people be the "fun uncle" or "fun aunt" and play a role in the child's life without them needing to bring a whole new body into the world.
  



2. if you don't have your own bio-children, your parents feel deprived, as if they die and their legacy doesn't live on.
 
 

Solution: adopt a young person (at least legal adult) who wants some more support but also has a voice in how they want to be treated and want their planet to be in 75 years.
  


 

 3. You can’t trust people to cooperate. Having a kid seems to require more hands on deck than just a nuclear family.  You want to pool resources yet you can't trust most people to walk their talk.   



Solution: a smartphone-based game where a number of adults can "adopt" one of the adults in their city or town to play the role of the child in the game. Then the role of the child rotates to the next adult.  Trust gets built, or you can weed out the unserious.  The adults provide the “adopted child” player with emotional support, guidance, maybe even food?  


4. Advocates of voluntary population degrowth are often countered with the argument that the aging population will have too few people to take care of them and they will be left to die alone and in horrible conditions.  They feel frustrated that a minor problem is being placed above a larger problem of potential mass extinction of humanity through overpopulation, ecological collapse, and mass starvation.  They feel grief, rage, and confusion.

 

  Solution: “Old-pooling”: a matching service that lets you adopt an older person in your area as a surrogate caregiver, streamlining the legal barriers while vetting appropriately, giving volunteers a chance to contribute from their surplus and make lighter work.



 

 5. problem: sharing a child with more adults looks deprivational and weird.  

 

  Solution: a streaming tv show about a family of ten adults raising one daughter that makes it normal: an all-American show about responsibility, love, and family