Should you have children? All LessWrong posts about the topic

post by Sherrinford · 2024-11-26T23:52:44.113Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  2010/2011
  2012/2013
  2016-2018
  2020-2022
  2023/2024: The Fertility Roundup Sequence
  2023/2024: Other posts
None
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Currently, there are 26 LessWrong forums posts tagged "family planning" [? · GW], the oldest from 2010. For a writing project, I read all of them. However, I realized that this collection may interest other people, so I publish it as a stand-alone post. I summarize the posts and their comments in the following. Feedback and comments are welcome.

 

2010/2011

• In "rationality and being child-free" [LW · GW] (20th Nov 2010), InquilineKea asks "So how do you think being child-free relates to rationality/happiness?" In the comments, some people discuss the effect of having children on parental happiness and life quality, or state their personal preferences about having children.
  • The arguments against children include the time-intensity of having children (and the personal preference for autonomy about your time usage), emotional aversion and feelings "unprepared".
  • Arguments on the pro-side include: Liking children, having children is seen as a public-good contribution, and people discuss whether rationalists should have kids to spread their culture (or whether children are desirable memecarriers for their parents), and some kind of selective pro-natalism according to which the "the future world would likely be a better place if wealthy, educated and responsible people have more kids."
  • Both on the contra-side and on the pro-side, it is noted that emotions (like insecurity) or desire are very powerful in determining decisions. It is also noted that this can lead to justify an emotion, urge or decision.
  • It is also told how there can be strong social pressure against having children in a certain milieu (in the 1980s) that both came from seeing children (or rather, people) as a negative factor in the world, but also "the world to be too horrible to bring children into." The counter-position to both claims is then mentioned (the author sees his own children as making the world better and the world to be better than ever).
• In June 2011, InquilineKea considers "Mentoring as an alternative to having children? [LW · GW]" as this yields "many of the benefits and few of the costs" but notes that there may be "something psychological missing out from all this". In the comments, people discuss other alternatives like sperm donations.

2012/2013

• jsalvatier's Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids [LW · GW] (May 2012) summarizes the book which notes that the costs of having kids are lower than you think because you don't have to put as much effort into it as you thought because how children develop is strongly influenced by genes. Chapter 6 is summarized as stating: "that on net, extra people have large positive externalities ..., so you shouldn’t feel guilty for having more children." People in the comments mostly discuss the evidence presented in the book, discuss the effects on happiness, whether they have an obligation to have kids or whether preferences change during their life.
• jefftk presents research on Parenting and Happiness [LW · GW] (October 2012). People discuss this relationship, including for example the suggestion to run cheap experiments on it, and the meaning of happiness. Having children is again discussed as a public good, this time among "smart people". In June 2014, there was more discussion of the happiness topic in the Comments to the question post "Happiness and Children" [LW · GW] by Carinthium.
• Equality and natalism [LW · GW] (October 2012) by an anonymous author is about whether "poor people should have fewer children, rich people more" for equality reasons.
• In "Is it immoral to have children? [LW · GW]" (October 2013), jefftk discusses whether Rachels' argument "Conceiving and raising a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be far better spent on famine relief; therefore, conceiving and raising children is immoral." There are many comments discussing this argument. In "Some thoughts on having children [LW · GW]" (January 2014), pianoforte611 discusses how much effort and money raising a child costs and also discusses the "moral case", that is, provides more discussion on Rachels' argument cited above.

2016-2018

• The article "Altruistic parenting" [LW · GW] (February 2016) explores the "cost per QALY of having a child for total utilitarians" and alternatives. Interestingly, gjm writes in a comment: "I think a prospective parent should be asking all of the following questions:
  • Am I -- are we -- ready to face the challenge?
  • Will I (we) be happier for having children?
  • Will the world be a better place for our having children?
  • If we have children, what will their lives be like?
    If you only ask "will I be happier?" then yes, there's probably something wrong with you. But I don't think it's an unreasonable question to ask alongside the others."
• In "Distinctions Between Natalism Positions [LW · GW]" (October 2017), ozymandias distinguishes natalism positions from "very strong anti-natalism" to "very strong pro-natalism". Interestingly, the "selfish" considerations (how does having children affect the parents) are mentioned in the weak pro-natalism or weak anti-natalism positions, whereas the "very" strong or weak positions focus on moral/ethical arguments. (Exception: "We need more people to support our aging population" and similar arguments are mentioned in "weak pro-natalism".)
• In "Antiantinatalism [LW · GW]" (February 2018), Jacob Falkovich discusses Benatar's "antinatalism" and lays out his counterposition that "Having children is good for the children, good for you, and good for the world". He first discusses the 1. philosophy of "negative utilitarianism, i.e. the view that reducing suffering is the principal (or only) thing that matters morally, and that moderate pain weighs more than great joy" as a foundation for antinatalism (Jacob states that he would accept "5 minutes of the worst pain imaginable for an hour of the greatest pleasure"), 2. the antinatalist claim that "Life is net negative" (Jacob does not share that view) and 3. the antinatalist position that there is a (moral) "divide between existing and non-existing agents, and the assertion that the latter (i.e. unborn babies) have only an absolute preference to avoid the risk of any suffering, and no preference for enjoying anything at all." (Jacob does not share that view.) He dismisses concerns about overpopulation and instead says that the existence of more people is better for everybody, and he says: "You have every reason to believe that your children’s lives will be better than your own, and that by joining the global economy they’ll contribute to making everyone better off in ways we can’t even imagine yet." Among the three object-level commenters, one notes that if we reach a "post-scarcity AI automated economy" in which "we did not need people anymore", humans "will have made themselves obsolete and a mere liability."

2020-2022

• In May 2020, Mati_Roy asks "What was your reasoning for deciding whether to raise children?" [LW · GW] and R L asks "What was your reasoning for deciding to have 'your own'/ natural-birthed children?" [LW · GW]. I'll list the answers to the two posts together.
  • People in the comments list as pro-reasons: "I really love the feeling of a soft warm baby in my arms"; feeling bad about not continuing the line of descendency from the first cells on Earth; contributing to a public good (or "cooperating in a multigenerational Prisonner's Dilemma"); satisfying "your curiosity" also by noting how being a parent changes yourself; "Watching little humans grow up and gain skills is emotionally satisfying. Even more if you can give yourself partial credit for the success."; it "will probably make me happier when I'm older"; it "gives me a reliable source of significant responsibility, which overall I value"; "playing a small part in creating the next generation of humans (and thus in creating the whole set of future humans)"; "the vast majority of human beings have lives worth living. ... having children is a good thing, if the quality of parenting is even minimally acceptable. Overall, I think having and raising children is good for parents but primarily it's good for the children (and, indirectly, their descendants)."; "our well-being is highest when we're around family and having kids is a great way to increase the chance of having family around for the rest of our lives"; "We also knew we had the type of marriage that was likely to remain stable/satisfying and we knew we could give our kids' a great start in life."; "I've always loved being with kids and wanted my own to raise someday ever since childhood."; "It just feels like an inherently good and meaningful thing to do for me."; "we find it better on the whole to exist than to not exist, proof of that being that most of us don’t wish to commit suicide (for the most part), even in extremely trying situations. Even if the world were falling apart (which admittedly it sometimes feels like it is), most of us would still fight to stay alive, because we value our own existence, and the existence of others."
  • Contra-reasons mentioned in the comments: finding it exhausting / needing a lot of sleep; "I don't always have my emotions very well under control and I know from experience how scary that can be for a child. I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish that don't involve children, and I'd certainly have to make major changes to the way I live to accommodate a child."; dating people who don't want children, strong aversion against the idea of being pregnant; "There are just too many things I need to be responsible at this point in history, that this is a commitment I can't make", while expecting "the world to become more chaotic"; "it's not very pleasant a lot of the time currently, and there is the constant additional exposure to the risk of terrible tragedy"; "the well-known short-term hit to our happiness during the kids' youngest years"; "I see kids as a burden, not a blessing."
  • People also consider unconventional options like having a relationship where someone has kids "but in many important ways is not responsible for them (e.g. doesn't live with them)" and discuss alternatives like living in group houses and running clubs for kids.
  • They also discuss on a meta-level: "I don't want to regret not having seriously considered it, or to realise I was lying to myself about not wanting, that doesn't sound healthy."
• In February 2021, there was an event called Anna and Oliver discuss Children and X-Risk [? · GW]. The post contains Anna's and Oliver's position summaries, and several people commented. (In response to that post, lincolnquirk wrote a post about the idea of living together with other families and sharing responsibilities, Enabling Children [LW · GW])
  • The pro positions include: having kids is "less fake" than many other things "particularly for areas that are easy to be confused about, such as AI risk", "the desire for kids/lineage is really basic for a lot of people" and "aligning with it leaves most of us with more of a shot at doing real things"; "having children increases my motivation to work on X-risk."; "a lot of my motivation (in general) stems from my love of my future children"; public good / in-group natalism, special version: "kids as a long-term investment in AI research"; (quasi-pro argument:) "whether to have children isn't each other's business and pressure against doing normal human things like this is net socially harmful".
  • The contra position includes: having children is too much of commitment for ambitious people who want to fight x-risk; "it definitely reduces the flexibility of e.g. giving up on income or moving to another country"; "in most cases, children on net detract from other major projects for common-sense time/attention/optionality management reasons (as well as because they sometimes commit people to a world view of relatively slow change)",
  • In the comments, people discuss data on whether successful people have kids and at which age (including differences between "politicians and entrepreneurs" on the one hand and "scientists, engineers, and philosophers" on the other) and gender differences.
• Successful Mentoring on Parenting, Arranged Through LessWrong [LW · GW] (October 2021) by supposedlyfun and Gunnar_Zarncke is about how to raise kids, not about whether you should have them.
• Mati_Roy asks "Should I delay having children to take advantage of polygenic screening? [LW · GW]" (2021) Commenters discuss the effects of that and of the optimal age to get children, which are both related to the question of whether people should have kids because the answer to this question may be influenced by health or other characteristics of the kids. The same could be said about braces' 2022 post "Costs and benefits of amniocentesis for normal pregnancies" [LW · GW].
• In December 2022, Yoreth asks "Is the AI timeline too short to have children? [LW · GW]": "now, both as I'm nearing the family-forming stage in my life, and as the AI timeline seems [LW · GW] to be coming into sharper focus, I'm finding it emotionally distressing to contemplate having children. If AI kills us all, will my children suffer? Will it be my fault for having brought them into the world while knowing this would happen? Even if I think we'll all die painlessly, how can I look at my children and not already be mourning their death from day 1? If I were to die right now, I would at least have had a chance to live something like a fulfilling life - but the joy of childhood seems inextricable from a sense of hope for the future. Even if my children's short lives are happy, wouldn't their happiness be fundamentally false [LW · GW] and devoid of meaning?" Points from the answers, sorted:
  • "having a happy childhood is just good and nothing about maybe dying later makes it bad", even if the childhood only lasts five years. Children live in the moment and don't think about the future, and they might have "higher average utility than adulthood."
  • "My feeling is that in most AI-kills-us-all scenarios, the AI kills us all quickly."
  • "It seems like this "not having kids" conclusion is a kind of emotional response people have to living in a world that seems scary and out of control, but I don't think that it makes sense in either case in terms of the interest of the potential kids. Finally, if you are just hanging out in community spaces online, the emotional sense of "everyone freaking out" is mostly just a feedback loop where everyone starts feeling how everyone else seems to be feeling, not about justified belief updates."
  • People die (and suffer) anyway and AI does not really change that.
  • You may regret not having children if, in the end, there is no AI catastrophe. "There is some chance that your risk assessment is wrong, which your probabilistic world-model should include."
  • "I think a big part of it is whether you are doing stuff to reduce AI risk, and whether having a kid would substantially impede your ability to do so."
  • On the other hand, for short timelines, it is noted that "parents tend to dip pretty hard into a place that's sustainable for a year or three, but would be unsustainable/bad if it were "this is just what life is like for me now, forever.""
  • A commenter says that the world is bad in general, in particular now, in particular for children.

2023/2024: The Fertility Roundup Sequence

• The "fertility roundup" sequence by Zvi discusses the state of fertility rate developments. Zvi is worried about shrinking societies due to people having too few children. The pro and contra of having children is more or less implicit in these texts. (I'd summarize the thesis as: If conditions are good for parents and their children, including money, housing and status, then people decide to become parents, but conditions are bad so people have few children.) Two of the posts are tagged "family planning" on LW, so let's see whether there is something about normative considerations (like "should you have children and if so, why?") in the text.
  • Fertility Rate Roundup #1 [LW · GW] (February 2023): Zvi claims that people have few kids because it is too costly and because parents "live in fear of social retaliation or having their children taken away if their children are allowed to play outside on their own".
  • In Fertility Roundup #3 [LW · GW] (April 2024), Zvi cites people who note that people have more alternative time use possibilities nowadays. This is surely not meant as advice (like "do something else instead of having children"), but I am not sure what to conclude. If this is a relevant reason why people have few children, then maybe rich and highly technological societies are just likely to shrink? Also, Zvi discusses that status competition makes having children more expensive which makes having children less attractive, while getting support payments makes having children more attractive. Moreover, cultural norms can be a burden for parents and for their children. Zvi also points to people not actually choosing their number of children but being constrained by biology or bad communication with their potential partners. Zvi also refers to a poll according to which "only 26% of people think having children is very important specifically to a ‘fulfilling’ life". Zvi also cites: "Aria Babu looks at correlations to ask what beliefs kill birth rates. Most things she looked at had little or no effect. The biggest effect was the percentage who agreed that ‘if the mother works, a preschool child is likely to suffer.’ Even then, the trend is not super strong, with a correlational effect size of 0.25 births per woman for no one versus everyone believing it, probably not entirely causal." But this says little about whether "a preschool child is likely to suffer" if the mother works only that this belief is empirically (somewhat) correlated with birth rates.
• In # Falling fertility explanations and Israel [LW · GW] (April 2024), Yair Halberstadt takes 8 "social trends" factors of which Robin Hanson claims that they "plausibly contribute to falling fertility" (they are also cited by Zvi) and checks how they apply to Israel. These "trends" are claims about why societies have less children, but to some extent, considering them may also be relevant for individual decisions. (However, I do not, for example assume that you can rationally choose a fundamentalist religion in order to be expected to have more children.)
  • "More gender equality - More equal gender norms, options, & expectations, have contributed to fewer women having kids.
  • Higher parenting effort - Expectations for how much attention and effort parents give each kid have risen.
  • Long stiff career paths - The path of school & early career prep til one is established worker is longer & less flexible.
  • Cap- vs cornerstone marry - Now marrying/kids wait until we fully formed, career established, then find matching mate.
  • Grandparent less involved - Parents once helped kids choose mates, & helped them raise kids. Now kids more on own.
  • More urban less rural - People now love in denser urban areas where housing costs more, kids have less space.
  • Less fundamental religion - Religion once clearly promoted fertility, but we less religious, especially re fundamentalism.
  • Integrated world culture - We pay less attention to local, and more to global, community comparisons and norms."

2023/2024: Other posts

• "Kids or No kids" [LW · GW] (November 2023) discusses all kinds of potential commitments a kid requires from the parents and how to balance them with being ambitious and doing good.
• In AI: Practical Advice for the Worried [LW · GW] (March 2023), Zvi writes, well, practical advice for people who are worried about catastrophic AI. While Zvi does "not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes", he thinks if AGI is developed, it might very likely "wipe out all value in the universe". The post contains all kind of advice for people worried about AI developments, based on the claim that "Normal Life is Worth Living, even if you think P(doom) relatively soon is very high". This includes advice on whether people should have children. I find a lot of this advice somewhat confusing. For example, Zvi writes "One still greatly benefits from having a good ‘normal’ life, with a good ‘normal’ future." which does not seem like a revolutionary statement - of course having good things is good. But then he explains why you should live as though you expected a good 'normal' future, but it is unclear to me whether Zvi thinks that you should just practice kayfabe or whether you should practice some kind of motivated believing, or whether instead he means that you should just plan rationally, that is, not overweight the probability of catastrophic-AI futures or underweight the years until AI arrives in your planning. For things like taking up debt, Zvi thinks it makes sense if you can "actually change the outcome for the better by spending money now". Zvi then answers the question "Does It Still Make Sense to Try and Have Kids?" as follows:
  • "Yes. Kids are valuable and make the world and your own world better, even if the world then ends. I would much rather exist for a bit than never exist at all. Kids give you hope for the future and something to protect, get you to step up. They get others to take you more seriously. Kids teach you many things that help one think better about AI. You think they take away your free time, but there is a limit to how much creative work one can do in a day. This is what life is all about. Missing out on this is deeply sad. Don’t let it pass you by.
    Is there a level of working directly on the problem, or being uniquely positioned to help with the problem, where I would consider changing this advice? Yes, there are a few names where I think this is not so clear, but I am thinking of a very small number of names right now, and yours is not one of them."
  • My impression is that this advice needs to be sorted a bit. So children have an instrumental value because they improve the world and improve their parents and their lives (including by getting others to take the parents more seriously). In particular, they change the parents' world model and expectations (but it is unclear whether or why the expectations move closer to reality by that). So but does the wellbeing of the children count in this advice? It is a bit cryptic. Zvi "would much rather exist for a bit than never exist at all". Fine, but does the "how" of your existence have any impact on this judgement? Can a potential life be so bad that Zvi would prefer not to live that life? Or is the amount of life satisfaction you experience commensurable to the other trade-offs listed? It seems to be at least in extreme cases (for potential world saviors it is better to put their time into saving the world). But this seems to imply that for everybody there are some thresholds combinations of "quality of life in the future" probability distributions and "potential parent can somewhat contribute to reducing this probability" that Zvi would answer that you should not have children.
  • A commenter notes that s-risks should be taken into account, such that your child could "suffer unimaginably". Another commenter states that s/he would love to have kids but is "not going to have kids because I won't want them to die early." Additionally, the higher discounting of the future seems to move at least one commenter towards attaching lower costs to having kids.
• Martin Kunev asks: "Would you have a baby in 2024? [LW · GW]" (December 2023), quoting an Eliezer Yudkowsy tweet "When was the last human being born who'd ever grow into being employable at intellectual labor? 2016? 2020?". One commenter says "If we solve alignment and end up in AI utopia, having kids is great! If we don't solve alignment and EY is right about what happens in a fast takeoff world, it doesn't really matter if you have kids or not." Others point out that the kind of expected scenario may matter for the kid and the parents. Then again, someone asked their kids if they are glad they exist (yes). Discussions about different kinds of AI doom and different kinds of regret, and someone says: "assuming your p(doom) isn't really high, this needs to balanced against the chance that AI goes well, and your kid has a really, really, really good life." and "If your timelines are short-ish, you could likely have a child afterwards, because even if you're a bit on the old side, hey, what, you don't expect the ASI to find ways to improve health and fertility later in life?" Again, time-investment vs. altruistic ambition. And: "One month after my first baby was born, I had a sudden and very deep feeling that if the world ended tomorrow, it would have been worth it. YMMV of course, but having kids can be a very deep human experience that pays off much sooner than you might think." People discuss AI timelines, subjective probabilities and how to rationally decide whether to have children.
• Raising children on the eve of AI [LW · GW] (February 2024) by Julia Wise. Julia notes that she thinks "of us in some kind of twilight world as transformative AI looks more likely: things are about to change, and I don’t know if it’s about to get a lot darker or a lot brighter." The post is mainly about whether kids should be raised differently, given such expectations. However, Julia also discusses whether having kids is "fair to the kids". She notes that it is good for people who are currently alive that they have been born even though people in the 1980's had bad expectations as well, and she says: "I find this very unintuitive, but I think the logic goes: it wouldn’t be fair to create lives that will be cut short and never reach their potential. To me it feels pretty clear that if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it’s better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born. When we asked them about this, our older kids said [LW(p) · GW(p)] they’re glad to be alive even if humans don’t last much longer." She cites happiness data to support this, but then says: "This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven’t properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you’re on the fence you should think more about it." Which is to say, Julia did not continue the line of thought, but it is not clear why.
  • Also, she quotes CS Lewis from 1948: "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds." This quote may seem encouraging to some people, but it seems to me that it comes from a specific historical context and while it is in general a good idea that you should not worry if the worrying does not serve any purpose, the quote does not say anything about whether you should have children, for example. The CS Lewis quote is called into question in the comments, also noting that while "if someone will have a reasonably happy life, it’s better for them to live and have their life cut short than to never be born" the condition may not always be fulfilled and then the conclusion does not hold.
  • The question of how to raise your kids (differently) that is also discussed in the post will certainly also affect the life-satisfaction and happiness of parenting. The same is probably true for worries that the kids may develop ("We’ve occasionally talked about AI risk, and biorisk a bit more, but the kids don’t really grasp anything worse than the pandemic we just went through.")
  • Julia also discusses the "How does having children affect your productivity and impact" topic also discussed in other posts.
  • One commenter says that it is never "fair to the kids to give birth to them, regardless of whether the world will end in a year, 10 years, or never" because everybody dies and that is horrible. Others disagree.

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