EA - My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career by 80000 Hours

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My thoughts on parenting and having an impactful career, published by 80000 Hours on January 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.When my husband and I decided to have children, we didn’t put much thought into the broader social impact of the decision. We got together at secondary school and had been discussing the fact we were going to have kids since we were 18, long before we found effective altruism.We made the actual decision to have a child much later, but how it would affect our careers or abilities to help others still wasn’t a large factor in the decision. As with most people though, the decision has, in fact, had significant effects on our careers.Raising my son, Leo — now three years old — is one of the great joys of my life, and I’m so happy that my husband and I decided to have him. But having kids can be challenging for anyone, and there may be unique challenges for people who aim to have a positive impact with their careers.I’m currently the director of the one-on-one programme at 80,000 Hours and a fund manager for the Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund. So I wanted to share my experience with parenting and working for organisations whose mission I care about deeply. Here are my aims:Give readers an example of a working parent who also thinks a lot about 80,000 Hours’ advice.Discuss some of the ways having kids is likely to affect the impact you have in your career, for people who want to consider that when deciding whether to have kids.Discuss challenges people might face in their careers related to having kids and how they might handle them.Help people feel less alone if they’re finding some of the standard parenting advice alienating — particularly any mothers who feel the literature tends to underestimate how much they care about their career.Write out some of the lessons I’ve learned and things I would have liked to have known beforehand (I still find some of this hard to keep in mind!).Start a conversation with the hope that other like-minded parents will share their lessons and suggestions.Highlight some of the ways the effective altruism community supports parents.Note different people find very different advice useful, and people’s situations vary greatly by how many children they have, whether they have a partner and what that person’s situation is like, what family help they have nearby, their socioeconomic condition, and so on. I’ve been very fortunate to live in a wealthy country like the UK with a lot of social support, and I’ve been paid well enough to always meet my needs. My experiences will be most relevant to people who are similarly situated.And some of what follows will be speculative, because I consider counterfactuals and possibilities that are inevitably uncertain. Also, my son is only three, so I have fairly limited experience. I’d love for others to contribute to this conversation and offer additional perspectives.Deciding whether to have childrenIt feels important that working to improve the world doesn’t prevent me from achieving any of the other things that are really significant to me in life — for example, having a good relationship with my husband and having close, long-term friendships.Becoming a parent was another personal priority in my life. For that reason, I didn’t think much about how having a child would affect the impact I had over my life. While I think it’s important to consider how we can best have a positive impact on the world, I don’t think it’s required or practical to think we might have to give up some of the things that are most important to us in the name of impact.I did think about it some when considering whether to have more children. The potential negative effects on my ability to have an impact with my career counted against having any more kids, but my husband also was ...