Mentoring as an alternative to having children?

The studies do show that having children is inversely related to happiness, but many people choose to have children anyways since they get a different sort of satisfaction from having children.

A major flaw that seems to run fairly consistently through these studies is that they aren't longitudinal over the course of an entire lifetime. That is, they focus entirely on the effect on happiness of having children while they are children, and ignore the possible difference in happiness when the parents are elderly. The old person surrounded by children and grandchildren is quite plausibly going be happier than the increasingly isolated person watching their friends die off one by one in the relatively unappealing environment of an assisted living facility.

I was never brought up in a loving or close family (asian parents), so I don't really see any benefits to having a family

The conclusion does not follow from the premise. This seems like excellent reasoning for employing different parenting strategies and family values than you experienced in your childhood, not evidence that there is no benefit to family under any circumstances.

I agree with the other comment makers that there are more effective ways of contributing to the world (i.e., saving the world) than causing a few 18-years-olds to exist in a couple of decades that would otherwise not have existed. However (and this has not been mentioned here yet) it might be the case that the experience of having children drastically improves a person's ability to pursue these more effective ways.

(Since most civlizational progress consists of significant contributions from a relatively small number of people, it would be nice if someone did a study of the rate of parenthood in that relatively small group of people.)

Particularly, having children might make a person much better at mentoring than anything else the person might do to get better at mentoring -- including getting practice at mentoring. (I know that many of my readers will consider that unlikely, so I am now going to try to defend it.)

For the purposes of this comment, let us define "mentoring" as the loaning of one's own instrumental rationality to another person to help that person with his career or his life. One advantage of defining the term this way is that it tends to illuminate what I consider the primary barrier to becoming a good mentor: actually caring about the other person approximately as much as one cares about oneself. In other words, the most important fact I know about mentoring is that most who want to be mentors or who consider themselves mentors are vastly better at optimizing their own careers and lives than they are at helping other human beings optimize their careers and lives. In other words, most prospective mentors are very bad at transferring (or "loaning") whatever skills and bodies of knowledge the prospective mentors have for dealing with the messy, not-easily-codified parts of work, life and human relationships.

The evidence I have that parenting makes you better at mentoring is not particularly strong. One big piece of evidence is that many parents seem to love their children more than they love themselves. E.g., when faced with resource constraints, they choose to spend resources on their child's education or health care instead of equally pressing needs of their own. Loving someone more than one loves oneself is very rare outside of the parent-child relationship.

It stands to reason that the hardest part of becoming a good mentor is achieving that first mentoring relationship in which the degree to which the new mentor actually cares about the protege is a signficant fraction of the degree to which the new mentor cares about him- or herself. Having children strikes me as the "royal road" (the most direct path, the best way) to achieving that first successful mentoring relationship. The other royal road would be having a committed sexual partner.

On the other hand, one of the best mentors I have ever met is a woman under 30 who has never been married and never had children. Both of her parents worked in occupations in which mentoring was the whole point. Overall, having parents who are good at mentoring is the strongest predictor I can think of of who will become a good mentor.

Another piece of evidence: I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to pick doctors because I have had a chronic illness my entire adult life. I am 50 now. Doctors very wildly in how useful they are to their patients, and the doctors who treated me who have children have been drastically more helpful to me than the ones without children.

If you're pretty sure that your comparative advantage is in discovering new scientific laws and such, then the expected utility of having kids is lower because there are plenty of examples (e.g., Newton, Thomson) -- even from the era before effective birth control during which most successful men had children -- of successful scientists never getting married and never having children. Of course, one does not need to be a good mentor to discover a new scientific law (although being a good mentor is a nice-to-have for its usefulness in helping one enter into mutually beneficial relationships with other good scientist-mentors).

If I didn't want kids of my own, I might consider fostering or adoption. (I consider it anyway, but ultimately continue to decide against it.)

As far as I can guess -- a foster parent would be a much better source here, but I don't see one forthcoming -- the main drawbacks of fostering and adoption is the emotional turmoil of the lack of security regarding keeping the child when attachment takes place (such children are often in limbo, with no biological parents not taking care of them at the moment but the parents can often reclaim them), and the challenges of attachment with children that haven't been taken care of in the past.

But if you are a kind person that can provide a stable, comfortable home for a child, I can think of hardly any greater contribution to the happiness of the world. Children, especially small children, desperately need to be part of a family (where a family means a safe adult they can depend on, and the more the merrier after that) and lacking that they are miserable and may cause further social trouble when they are adults.

Personally I realize I don't have the emotional resilience. While I could take care of a hurting child if I needed to, I have such a small store of emotional strength that if had foster or adopted children I know I would be less of a parent for my own children. However, if someone had the strength, wouldn't that be an incredibly direct way to help the world?

If you're mainly interested in optimizing your influence on the world / future generations, things like writing, mentoring and so on are surely much more efficient than parenting.

The studies do show that having children is inversely related to happiness

I haven't seen the relevant studies, so I don't know if this has already been accounted for, but it strikes me that since most people do have children at some point, there are probably some distinct psychological differences on average between people who do and don't have children.

It's like the studies that show that people who occasionally drink alcohol in moderation tend to live longer than those who don't drink at all; one might conclude that moderate alcohol consumption is healthy, but since adults who don't drink alcohol at all are exceptional, you'd want to look for other relevant ways non-drinkers tend to deviate from the norm.

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