This is condensed from a conversation I had with Kat Woods about how she approached the decision of whether to have children.
Kat is the president of the Nonlinear Fund and co-founded Charity Entrepreneurship, Charity Science Health (Suvita), and Charity Science.
Kat: I still feel very much like I understand both sides. And so it’s really easy to empathize with both.
I super, super wanted kids. I didn’t want kids when I was younger, and then when I was about 20 I was in the park, minding my own business and a little toddler toddled up to me and he gave me this bent daisy. And my brain exploded! I was like, “Oh my God, I need babies now.”
I just became absolutely obsessed. EA was my number one priority, and the next one was kids. I actually had a blog about parenting. I was reading all these books about it, reading studies and figuring out exactly how to deal with pregnancy and everything. I’d sit out outside of playgrounds and do my homework next to the playground so I could watch the kids play, just be around them.
Then I was like: impact. I decided that I wasn’t going to have kids because of impact. And that was the worst. For the longest time, this was the closest I ever felt to giving up because I just felt so resentful.
Every time I saw a kid, I just felt so horrible. I was like, why the fuck am I doing this? I don’t even know if anything’s working. And this is so important to me.
Julia: What kind of effects were you thinking about on your impact?
Kat: The main thing is just time and energy. Basically every spare amount of energy I had was going towards impact. So there was no room for kids. Any extra thing that I took on as a responsibility, it was definitely just going to have to come from the “helping the world” budget.
Then I just felt bad all the time. The thing that made me realize that I would actually have kids was realizing: I just have to have one willpower break. I just have to have a willpower break long enough to have a kid, and then it’s over. Then I was like, well, I’m probably going to have the willpower break anyway, so might as well just plan accordingly.
Goal factoring and practical experience
Kat: So then me and my husband at the time were planning on having kids. But it was never the right time. I thought, maybe I’ll do the goal factoring. I came up with this spreadsheet. I came up with a whole bunch of different options that you could do. I basically broke down, what are the things I want about children and what are the things that [my partner] wants about children? Because those are different. And then I came up with a whole bunch of like alternatives. Like what about a dog? What about fostering? Volunteering a lot with kids? All sorts of stuff. And that was to tide me over until we could have kids, and maybe find something that didn’t require as much time investment.
Then we stumbled on babysitting. Oh man, I get to spend time with the kids and develop this relationship with them. But also I get paid for it. Amazing!
I babysat three separate sets of kids, and they were all perfectly ordinary kids. They were not kids with behavior problems or anything like that. But that was enough for me to realize: oh, I do not want to be a parent. I do not want children at all.
I’d had experience with kids before. I’d been a summer camp leader. I’d worked with 30 plus kids at a time for a whole summer, that sort of stuff. And I loved it, but what I realized when I babysat was that I was just the fun summer camp leader. I went and played games with them, and it’s fun to play with kids. Playing with kids is the best.
But putting them to bed? Holy shit. Why is it so hard!? I’d read all the books and I was like, oh, I’ll appeal to intrinsic motivation and reason. Nope, does not work. Very quickly I ended up bribing them. I was like, I will give you candy if you go to bed, please.
Two things that happened:
The kid who I babysat the most, the first day I came, he was like, let’s make potions. I was like, yeah, let’s make potions! It’s really fun. The next time I came, he’s like, let’s make potions. I was like, oh, we made potions last time. How about we do something different? He’s like “POTIONS!” Okay, fine. And then it was potions again. And potions again. And I was like, wow, this was fun the first time. And now this is really irritating. I just can’t convince him to do anything else.
The other thing was one time I was there when his mom was still there and he was eating some cereal at the table. He’s five, right? and he had said something that was kind of racist or sexist, I forget what it was.
And the mom was just perfect. She had clearly read all the parenting books, and she just responded in the most perfect way. She gave this great speech about how to think about it.
And I was like, wow, you gave a really good metaphor there, this is so inspiring, you’re such a good mom!
And the kid just looked up and was like, “Mom, I want more sugar.” He didn’t care at all. He was not listening. He just wanted more dopamine.
I was like, ah, it’s just so destroying.
I want to be that sort of mom. I want to impart important wisdom and stuff. Obviously I’m sure eventually he’s going to grow up to not be bad or anything. He’s just five and it takes time. But argh!
So then I ended up not wanting kids at all — I totally switched. It went from my system one was like, “I want kids,” but my system two was like, “I don’t want them,” to now both of them are in complete agreement.
I still like playing with kids. Occasionally I’ll get this little twinge, like, aw, they’re so cute. But just give it five minutes. Almost always within five minutes, they’ll do something really annoying. And I’ll be like: ah yes, this is why I don’t want them.
I think the lesson from this that I took away is that before you have kids, it’s really good to get some babysitting experience. It’s a really good way to cheaply test being as close to being a parent as you can be without actually being a parent, that’s pretty available to most people. Once you have them, you can’t go back, there’s no “I’ve changed my mind.”
Babysitting, you could just try it a bit and be like, oh wow, I really don’t like this actually. I think a lot of people just have experience with kids at Christmas time, or just peripherally around. That quick taste.
Like sometimes advice is: before you have kids, get a dog first and see how you feel. Dogs are cool, but they’re way less work than a kid. Right. I think babysitting is closer to that.
My main advice to people is like first do the goal factoring, maybe actually you do just want a dog.
Now that I think about it, I’m like, how much did I want a kid, and how much do I want playing with a kid, which I mostly just get from having a dog? A dog would fit way better. When I was looking through all the things I looked forward to about having a kid, it was almost entirely things that dogs are much better at than kids. And they don’t have all the extra other things. I mean, they still have a little bit of extra stuff.
When I’m excited about kids, I was excited about pregnancy and the first two years. And then after that, eh . . . that’s only a very small part of the whole experience.
Also, I’m pretty sure I’m just wrong about my expectations, about how much I’m going to enjoy this. I really like sleep. I’m a really bad person when I’m sleep deprived. And from everything I’ve read and heard, you are going to be sleep deprived for the first couple of years.
And I don’t like pain. Like when I got my IUD out, I was like, man, I never want to give birth. That was really painful. And that was definitely not as painful as giving birth!
So that’s my story: do the cheap test of doing babysitting and do some goal factoring. Maybe you just want a dog or maybe you just want to like be a Big Brother / Big Sister volunteer or something.
The spreadsheet
Rows include things like
- Live with relatives/housemates with kids
- Get a dog
- Babysitting
- Live next to alternative school that you volunteer at
- Volunteering
- Hire young students as interns
- Biological kids
- Domestic adoption
- International adoption
- Fostering
- Maximize hedonism
And the columns include costs and benefits like
- Starting costs
- Yearly cost
- Time cost weekly
- Love
- Commitment level
- Logistical hassle
- Parent age deadlines
Kat:
“Live next to alternative school” was just based on some unschooling schools where you can basically go hang out at the school and teach kids things. I just think a lot of people would just benefit a lot from that and get a lot of what they’re looking for from kids.
One of the other ones is to maximize hedonism, maximize your own pleasure and happiness. Maybe then you don’t particularly want kids because you’re like, “Yeah, this is fucking awesome.”
Predicting what it might be like
Julia: The question that’s on my mind is how good are we at predicting what an experience is going to be like?
Babysitting is going to help you have a clearer picture than just thinking about it or just watching kids at the park or being the fun camp counselor. And yet it just feels very hard to predict what one’s experience of something will be.
It does feel like there are things you can do that will give you useful information. But there’s a different thing that I came away with like nannying, spending time with other people’s kids. And that was that I still wanted to, even though I saw the boring grind of it. Getting some visceral feel for the boring grind. And seeing how you feel about it after that.
Kat:
I’m sure if the multiverse theory is true, I’m sure there’s parts of the universe where I did end up having kids. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that version of Kat is like, wow, I can’t believe in some versions of the multiverse I didn’t have children, how empty my life would have been without Amy or whatever.
I’m pretty good at seeing the good. I don’t think that if I’d had kids, it would have been like, “man, I’m really miserable.”
Although I also think on the other hand, I’m much less attached to my direct family than I feel most people are. I’m much more like, “if I wasn’t related to you, we probably wouldn’t be friends.” And so maybe I would have that with my kids. “Man, if I weren’t your mom, like we’d never hang out.” That’s probably not a great thing to have in a mom.
The other thing too is that having a kid is like the ultimate form of commitment. Like, you can get rid of tattoos, you can get divorced, but once you have a kid, you are stuck, you cannot go. It is socially impossible and also psychologically impossible for most people. So you really want to be careful.
Who are you parenting with?
Kat: One piece of advice I really want to give to people is: be really careful who you have kids with. You’re properly committing to them if you have kids with them. Like me and [my ex] have a great relationship, as ex-partners now.
If we’d had kids, it would have been a nightmare. It would have been so bad. I would have had to be stuck in London. I’m not sure if I would have been able to have my current partner now. And we have very different parenting styles. I always thought before, oh well, we’ll just figure it out. But if we’re like ex-husband and ex-wife, that’s a very different story. That’s a lot harder to manage.
I think if you had asked me before, “What do you think it would be like co-parenting with him as an ex-husband?” I think even when I was like peak smitten, I would have been like, “Yeah, that would be a pain in the ass. That would be extremely bad.” We’d be rational, be altruistic, but also I think the altruism actually can be a con sometimes. It depends on how soft versus rigid your altruism is or something.
For example, both of us would care a lot about the kid. So it wouldn’t be this thing that’s really easy to compromise on. This is like the most important thing, you can’t just compromise, “Oh, well, we can agree to disagree.” It’s like, “No, my kid will be fucked up if you do it this way.” Like about how much freedom the kids should have. . . . that would have been like a really big fight, or ongoing fight actually.
I even think with my current partner, if we had a child and then we were exes that would be bad as well. But that doesn’t mean that we’re a bad couple, it’s just co-parenting with your ex is hard. It’s already hard to co-parent with your current partner, let alone with your ex-partner.
Movie recommendations from Kat
- The Marriage Story. It’s amazing. It’s about a couple who gets divorced, them going through that and having kids at the same time.
- The Lost Daughter. I wouldn’t recommend as much as The Marriage Story, but it’s very relevant. Basically about a mom who has a couple of girls and she just finds it really deadening. She’s trying to do academic research and it’s really hard to balance that and having these kids. It feels really real, like where they show the kids and where she’s struggling. I’m like, wow, that was my babysitting experience. It’s just the kids being kids. They weren’t being bad, they’re just being children. And I’m going crazy.
- The Letdown. It’s an Australian comedy about this new mom and all the new mom stuff. It seems realistic again, I haven’t had kids, so I do not know, but in terms of my babysitting and everything, I’m like yeah, this feels about right.
I feel like watching those is kind of like the easier version of babysitting. Babysitting, you have to go get a babysitting job, and that’s a whole thing.
What this advice is not
Kat: One thing I think that’s really important to emphasize: this is things to do if you’re uncertain if you really want kids, I really don’t want to encourage people to not have kids because of impact. I think that’s entirely wrong. That’d be like saying like, oh, to be an EA, you have to be celibate because partners can distract you. No, that’s gone too far. This is an important part of what people often need to be happy and have meaningful lives.
I think when I tried to not have kids because of impact, I think that was wrong and bad. I don’t want to encourage that with other people. I just want people to be informed, and do some quick, easy tests before they commit their lives to new beings.
I don’t usually comment on these parenting posts (because I’m not a parent and so don’t have much that’s relevant to offer), but I just wanted to say that I’m really enjoying them! I’m hoping to become a parent within the next few years, so this is very helpful.
I don’t think babysitting is a good analogue for having kids. Once you get past the “can I afford this” question, the decision to become a parent is perhaps less about assessing your likely feelings about doing specific activities with young humans and more about assessing your likely feelings about and past experiences with doing things that felt hard but worth it to you, particularly longer term things.
Of course there are people who think they will feel it’s worth it and then regret having children (even if they don’t regret the existence of their particular children), and people who didn’t intend to become parents but find themselves glad they did anyway. But this interview is with a non-parent giving advice to other people about how to decide whether or not to become a parent, so I would take that with a huge grain of salt – her advice is not going to be as reliable as someone who is a parent or is functioning as a parent in their daily life. She simply doesn’t have both experiences to truly compare.
Would you ask someone who isn’t a doctor, but who once did a few stints as a camp counselor where they had to fix up some scrapes and cuts and maybe deal with some vomit what it’s like to be a doctor and whether or not you should go to medical school? I doubt it. That’s not a value judgement, it’s reality. It feels similar to someone without kids watching a single interaction between a parent and their children and making judgements about what the parents are doing well or poorly in general. It’s not good data – they don’t have the larger context and they don’t have a real sense of the benefits and drawbacks over time. I once heard a friend say, “I was a much better parent before I became one.” They were making fun of themselves for all the opinions they had about parenting before having kids and all the things they thought they knew, but didn’t.
Maybe assessing one’s readiness or willingness for parenthood is also about accepting the fact that no matter how much you prepare, you simply cannot know what it will be like for you until it happens. You can make all the spreadsheets and do all the research, but in the end, you have to be willing to go on that adventure. You have to accept that you are embarking on a decades-long endeavor that you won’t know how it went until it’s basically over. You can be a good parent and glad you had your kids if you don’t adopt that attitude, but your daily and overall experience of having kids will probably not feel as satisfying.
Parenting is the most difficult and the most joyful thing I’ve ever done. Letting go of expecting any particular outcome and embracing the process and experiences along the way has been a constant practice and I’m better for it. I also recognize it’s not for everyone, for a variety of reasons. I might also advise folks considering parenthood to go to therapy if they haven’t, assuming they have the means to do so, and to read some (good/accurate) child development resources. So much of the mismatched expectations about parenting seem to come from unrealistic ideas and over- or underestimating what kids are capable of at various ages. Examining your own assumptions and attitudes about parenting and kids, your own experience of being parented, and your partnership with anyone you are going to co-parent with, will go a long way toward making your eventual parenting experience the most enjoyable that it can be, and/or it can help you make the decision about whether to parent at all.
Interestingly, and on a slightly adjacent topic, I became much more vehemently pro-choice after I experienced pregnancy and had kids. I was pro-choice before that, but the reality of what it would mean to support and survive a healthy (and in my case a high risk) pregnancy couldn’t truly hit home until I was actually faced with doing it. I can’t imagine being forced to do that if I didn’t want to; it was hard enough when I actively wanted it. (This is why I think it’s especially ridiculous and awful that a bunch of old men are making decisions about what is or isn’t legal regarding pregnancy.)
The key thing about being a parent is that you have the deepest and most meaningful emotional connection of your life with that little human.
Babysitting to figure out whether you want a kid is like prostituting yourself to find out whether you want a relationship. You can’t just take the emotional connection out of an experience and expect there to still be much of a resemblance!
If you are unsure about whether you want kids you should think about how much you want that kind of connection in your life. Because that’s the upside. Not playing or educating or whatever else you might enjoy about interacting with kids. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s nice – compared to the emotional connection it’s a wash.
About the rest:
The movie recommendation seem mostly for post-hoc rationalisation after the decision against kids has already been made.
If your brain explodes with “Oh my God I need babies now” you should probably have babies now without embarking on years of massive overthinking. Generally, if there are no major life changes scheduled in the next year, the right time is now. Over time it will only get more and more difficult in every respect.
Different parenting styles are only a problem if you turn them into a problem. The kids are just going to roll with it. Your partner or ex-partner will not fuck up your kids. It is remarkably difficult to mess up your kid by “wrong parenting”.
I’d also say that it is more important to have kids early (or at all) than to have them with the right partner.
Seriously, kids are great! Not everyone should have them but most people should. If you are on the fence, just go ahead. You will not be able to understand the upside until you have them. However, you will be able to understand the downsides just fine, so if you overthink it you’ll never have them.
I appreciate the comments on this post, as the post really threw me for a loop. Comments on LessWrong express similar sentiments. Curious how Kat and Julia would respond to the assertion that Kat’s experiments were not an accurate indication of how she’d feel about parenting her own children, because with other kids she lacks the emotional connection she’d have with her own kids.
(I’m a man in my mid-30s who realized a few years ago that I have a clear felt sense I want kids, but really value my time and energy and am daunted by the sacrifices in that regard. This post threw me for a loop, but reading the comments I’ve mentioned has returned me to the conclusion that having kids would be the right choice for me.)
Honestly, I would argue that the comments following the lines of “Kat is not a parent and therefore cannot possibly comment on what parenting is like” rather unhelpful. Following the doctor example, just because a doctor has never personally experienced kidney stones that doesn’t mean a doctor will not know everything there is to know about kidney stones and understand it deeply.
I feel that the opinion of someone who’s observed parents, children, their interaction can be just as valid as someone who is living them day in-out. I’m not saying it’s more valid – just that it is equally valid.
For two reasons:
1. we don’t all need to experience something in first person to understand it, and understand its implications
2. parenting is tough, and a full-life commitment. This can mean that parents may be reluctant to come to the conclusion that they have made a choice they regret, and that they are overall less likely to do so (partially because one way to survive the struggles of parenting is convincing yourself that you’ve made the right choice)
If anything, I think a major take home of this article is the idea that you should have a good hard think about whether you want to have kids, or whether you’re just following the default mode of societal expectations when you feel that you should have them. It is a major life change, and it is an investment for life. A wonderful one, absolutely. But I think it’s disingenuous of people to suggest your life won’t be different with kids. It’s inevitable that it would be, as sharing your life intimately with someone else would!
So yeah, gathering as much evidence and testing the potential of having kids as much as possible is a wonderful idea. Whether babysitting is close enough to parenting may be debatable, but it’s not like there are major options out there. Perhaps fostering would be a closer alternative.
If you find yourself having a deep, instinctual desire to have a kid, no degree of hard thinking will get you out of that, and that is just fine. However, if you are on the fence, the suggestions above are all worthy of your time, I’d argue more than “kids are great, go for it!”.