The most important effect of parenting on productivity is left out here. A whole new person is created, meaning a whole additional person's worth of productivity! And with only a two decade or so delay. Not to mention a whole additional person's worth of happiness, and of combating demographic decline. So while it may be true that in the short term additional children decrease productivity, in the long term (which is what we as EAs should be caring most about) each additional child massively increases productivity. 

Thanks for doing this! I was curious so I dug a bit more into the Federal Reserve paper. I think you are accurately reporting their conclusion, but the conclusion feels somewhat shaky to me.

First, they note that, without controls, people with children are generally more productive than the childless, not less:

They then introduce a number of different controls. The "The total productivity cost of having one, two, or three preteens was 9.5%, 22%, and 33%" statistic you report is one model, and it may be worth noting that the 9.5% number (= exp(−0.1003) − 1) is not significant at p = 0.1. Amusingly, the impact of getting tenure dwarfs the impact of children, causing an estimated 50% decrease in productivity:

They then introduce a difference-in-differences estimation "to remove any estimation bias related to time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity". They say of this model's results:

The estimate is negative, relatively small, and statistically not significant, implying that pregnancy, childbearing, and motherhood have no large effect on the mother’s research productivity in the first three years after the birth of her first child... The only statistically significant effect of fatherhood relates to tenure in column (6) of Table 9. Untenured men become substantially more productive after having a first child. Their output increases by 20%

I'm not sure why they chose to report their first model in the summary but not the second one. The cynical explanation is that they did this because only the first model returned significant results, although then I'm left wondering why they included the second model at all.

Anyway, my personal summary of this paper is something like "depending on how you slice the data, you can conclude anything from 'having kids is a mild cost' to 'having kids is a mild benefit', and it feels hard to confidently say much more."

(To be clear: I don't think you are citing this paper incorrectly, I just think the paper itself is reporting its results in a confusing way.)

divide labor between you and your partner

Is there any evidence as to whether a more equal division of labor reduces the overall loss in productivity, rather than merely rearranging the split of that loss between the two partners?

I would caution against leaning to heavily on only productivity impacts when deciding whether to have a child or not. I do not think this post intends to say this, but I worry this could be the takeaway for some readers and therefore thought it worthwhile to expand on. Something the material in this post leaves out is the effect of wanting to have children but deciding not to due to concerns about productivity. While this has not been studied to my knowledge, I would be concerned about studies on involuntary childlessness - my precursory understanding is that people who want children but do not have them are more likely to suffer mentally. Moreover, if you have kids and obsess about productivity, they will likely pick up on it - I have 2 examples of that (i.e. my own kids and how they very easily pick up on "daddy has to work")! I therefore think that issues around parenting and productivity should be navigated with a lot of care and deliberation. If nothing else - if you worry about productivity and decide against having kids I think you should strongly consider freezing some eggs and sperm to increase the chance that you can have kids later on if you regret your decision - treat your future self with compassion! One further idea might be to survey current EA parents if anyone regrets having children due to the impact on productivity.

That said, I think this article can be helpful for those of us that have children but are wondering about healthy ways to increase productivity. One tip from my side is to set a fixed number of hours to work each week that feels achievable. I do this and feel good about the work I completed while I can after than dedicate time to my family "productivity guilt free".

Thanks for writing this. 

I was curious about this claim, because I was not sure what the intended causal mechanism would be:

Taking parental leave shorter than 1 month does not mitigate productivity losses, but parental leave longer than 1 month and less than 12 months correlated with an 11%–17% productivity^[2] improvement

But when I look at the chart in the citation it makes it look like <1 month leave does typically have positive impacts?

This was a really interesting read. Anecdotally, I'd put in that since having my two children my dedication to the future has increased dramatically. I genuinely care about, and I will butcher this saying, planting trees the shade of which I will never sit under. 

Maybe I was a bad, amoral  person and now I have a personal interest in making a better world. Maybe this works only for me. But knowing the world I help build will be the one my children have to live in has certainly made me choose better career paths and projects, as well as adding rocket fuel to my motivation.

As always, mileage will vary significantly between people.

 I haven't yet looked at the papers cited, but aren't they probably hopelessly confounded?  This seems to be one of the areas where it's hardest to measure causal effects.

Nicholas - thanks for posting this helpful summary of these empirical studies.

I do find it somewhat sad and alarming that so many EAs seem to be delaying or avoiding having kids, out of fear that this will 'impair productivity'. 

Productivity-maxxing can be a false god - and this is something that's hard to understand until one becomes a parent.

Just as money sent to charities can vary 100x in terms of actual effectiveness, 'productivity' can vary hugely in terms of actual impact in the world. 

Lots of academic parents I know (including me) realized, after having kids, that they had been spending huge amounts of time doing stuff that seemed 'productive' or 'fun' at the time, but that wasn't actually aligned with their genuine long-term goals and values. Some of this time was spent on self-indulgent status-seeking, credentialism, careerism, workaholism, networking, etc. Some of it was spent on habit-forming but unfulfilling forms of leisure (TV, video games, light reading). Much of it was mating effort to find and retain a sexual partner(s). And some of it was spent on feeling depressed, anxious, etc, wondering about the meaning of life -- concerns that tend to evaporate when you start spending more time enjoying the company of your kids, when the 'meaning of life' becomes bittersweetly apparent.

Not sure how much to trust GPT's outputs here (I have not verified it), but I was a bit surprised to find that so many female Nobel prize recipients might (again, GPT might hallucinate) have had children. I think this is more towards anecdotal evidence, but might indicate that just counting number of articles leaves out important information. Perhaps the quality of work stays the same or is even increased by having children, even though the amount of work decreases? At least in my case with my kids, while my hours available for work has decreased, I definitely have not experienced a decrease in quality of my work, and if anything, I feel more invigorated and ideas come easily to me when I am not working.

I also asked GPT to do the same for wealthy, self-made women:

If not already obvious, I am probably at risk of some degree of motivated reasoning given that I already have 2 kids!

Thank you so much! I've been wondering about exactly this... but wasn't productive enough to research it yet. 😅

It's always good to look at the data, and I admire that. So this is absolutely not a criticism of the post, but just something to consider in the context of this discussion. 

But to get the full picture, we also need to factor in the impact the children could have. I have no evidence to support this, but isn't it likely that children who are born of ethical effective altruists, and who receive loving attention from their parents, are more likely to themselves make a positive impact on the world, compared to "average" children? 

And the possible achievements of one child, in one full lifetime, vastly outweigh a small drop in productivity of one parent over a short part of their career. 

It seems to me that the most important consideration is to raise moral children and to help them understand the important of altruism, ideally showing by example. Anything that takes away from this feels counterproductive, even if it might briefly moderately increase the parent's productivity. 

There may be exceptions when the parent is working on something extremely important or in a position of extreme influence which the child is unlikely to attain - or if you're doing something at a uniquely critical time. Maybe it's not a great idea to take a year of parental leave if you're a leading AI Governance researcher right now. But these would be quite exceptional. 

Executive summary: Having children leads to short-term productivity declines for mothers and more engaged fathers, but the effects diminish after about 10 years. Delaying parenthood, taking parental leave, and having fewer children can mitigate the productivity hit.

Key points:

1. Mothers suffer median 17% productivity loss after having a child, fading after 10 years. Fathers unaffected unless primary caregivers.
2. Each additional child adds ~11% more productivity loss.
3. Delaying children until after 30 avoids long-term productivity declines.
4. Taking 1+ month parental leave (up to 1 year) boosts productivity 11-17%.
5. Being less engaged as a parent reduces impact on productivity.
6. Having children intentionally rather than accidentally reduces productivity hit.
7. Working in more collaborative fields like computer science mitigates productivity declines.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.