Having children is not the most effective way to improve the world. Have them because you want them, not "for impact".

By Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️ @ 2025-08-10T06:54 (+55)

First off, every ethical argument for having children is dominated by other options that are more effective.

1) If you’re worried about population issues, just donate $10k to bednets. That’s roughly the equivalent of two extra children existing in the world.

If you only care about population issues in your own country, then there are undoubtedly charities that save/create more lives in your own country that are cheaper than having your own children.

I would also recommend questioning your beliefs that people in your own country matter more than other countries.

2) If you’re worried about “idiocracies” and think your genes would make the difference, donate your sperm/eggs, and call it a day.

This also addresses the whole “you owe it to your ancestors” logic.

If you think you’d provide a better environment for the children than other people, remember that having children that feel like a burden is not a good environment for children.

And regretting children is more common than you ever hear about due to cognitive dissonance and the social stigma about not liking parenthood. (Check out the subreddit “regretful parents” to see what I mean).

Also, mentorship and advocacy is way more scalable and effective per effort than trying affect your own kids over decades.

Just go around promoting good ideas and altruism to young adults and you’ll affect way more people.

3. If you think you “owe it” to your parents, consider how unethical it is for somebody in a position of power to force an uninformed, non-consenting minor to sign a binding, life long contract.

This is what it would mean to think that children, by dint of being born, owe their parents grandchildren.

4. If you think it’s “selfish” to not have children, that’s just incoherent.

Having children then neglecting them is selfish.

If you don't have children, there’s nobody to be selfish to.

Unless you try to appeal to it making the world a better place to have children, and then you’re back to donating bednets and sperm/eggs, which is the more effective option for making the world better.

You could try to say having children makes you happier, but then that’s a selfish argument to have children, not an ethical one.

And, also, that's a highly questionable statement. The research is very unclear about this. It probably varies a ton based on the person, the child, the environment, and the counterfactuals.

In fact, given the opportunity costs of having children, where you could be spending that time and money on more effective ways to help the world, like helping sick children in the developing world, there are much more compelling ethical arguments to not have children.

Except I think it’s a bad idea to make ethical arguments either way about having children.

The drive to have (or not have) children is like the drive to form (or not form) romantic relationships.

Having children is a deep, probably unchangeable, human need, and some people have it, and some people have the opposite.

Saying that it would be unethical to have children would be like trying to say it’s unethical for people to form romantic relationships because it takes time and money away from impact.

Saying that it’s unethical to not have children would be like trying to say that it’s unethical for asexual people to not form a relationship, because having a relationship makes you happier and it's better for society to have married people.

Trying to contort your brain into either configuration if you have a strong desire to have kids or not have kids will similarly just make you miserable.

Have children if you really want them.

Don’t have children if you really don’t want them.

If somebody tries to ethically pressure you into either decision, reason with them calmly, then ignore them and carry on with your life.

JackM @ 2025-08-10T17:30 (+25)

Do people actually have kids because they think it's the most effective way to improve the world?

Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️ @ 2025-08-10T17:45 (+16)

I've known a few people who say this.

And there are some people online who promote this, but I think for most of them they had kids for the usual reasons (they wanted them) and then post hoc came up with reasons for why it's actually the best thing for the world.

You can tell because they don't actually do cause prioritization like they do with the other causes. There are no cost-effectiveness analyzes comparing having children to mentorship etc.

It usually feels more like how most people talk about ordinary charities. Exaggerated claims of impact and no attempt to do genuine cause comparison and feeling offended if you try to bring up alternatives and do a systematic comparison of the options.

Mostly this show's up as people saying it is unethical to not have children even if the person is an EA and they know that that time and money would be coming out of donations to effective charities, so they are making the claim that it is more effective to have children than it is to donate more.

Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2025-08-11T17:51 (+9)

I've known a few people who say this.

Within EA? Because the normal EA argument I've heard is "don't have kids, use the time/resources more productively" (ex: Rachels (2014)) or "have kids if you want to, since we should all have some budget for doing things that are important to us" (ex: me in 2013, a couple in 2023)

JackM @ 2025-08-11T20:34 (+2)

Will MacAskill is positive towards having children, although he doesn't say it's the best thing you can do. From What We Owe The Future:

But given the benefits of having children and raising them well, I do think that we could start to once again see having kids as a way of positively contributing to the world. Just as you can live a good life by being helpful to those around you, donating to charity, or working in a socially valuable career, I think you can live a good life by raising a family and being a loving parent.

David T @ 2025-08-10T20:26 (+1)

"Pro-natalists" do, although that tends to be more associated with specific ideas that the world needs more people like them (often linked to religious or nationalistic ideas) than EA. The average parent tends to think that bringing up a child is [one of] the most profound ways they can contribute to the world, but they're thinking more in terms of effort and association than effect size.

I also think it's pretty easy to make a case that having lots of children (who in turn have descendants) is the most impactful thing you could do based on certain standard longtermist assumptions (large possible future, total utilitarian axiology, human lives generally net positive) and uncertainty about how to prevent human extinction but I'm not aware of a strand of longtermism that actually preaches or practices this and I don't think it's a particularly strong argument.

Larks @ 2025-08-11T01:45 (+24)

If you’re worried about population issues, just donate $10k to bednets. That’s roughly the equivalent of two extra children existing in the world.

[assuming fertility does not fall as child mortality falls]

If you think you “owe it” to your parents, consider how unethical it is for somebody in a position of power to force an uninformed, non-consenting minor to sign a binding, life long contract.

This feels a bit like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Most people believe that 'uninformed, non-consenting minor's do acquire obligations, for example:

To pay taxes, and support their share (as determined by the government) of the national debt.
To serve in the military in the event of conscription.
To do jury duty.
To vote, ideally in a well-informed fashion.
To save nearby drowning children in pools if it is cheap to do so.
To avoid being grossly rude to strangers for no reason.

If you are an Randian libertarian, who rejects these sorts of obligations, then it seems reasonable to also reject obligations to parents. But if you believe in any sort of non-contractual positive duty, duties to your parents should not seem weird... in fact it seems much more plausible that you might have special duties to the parents to whom you owe your life and childhood than to strangers who have done nothing for you.

JackM @ 2025-08-11T20:10 (+5)

But if you believe in any sort of non-contractual positive duty, duties to your parents should not seem weird

If you're a utilitarian/consequentialist, as the vast majority of EAs are, there aren't going to be duties to any particular entity. If you have any duty, it is to the common good (net happiness over suffering).

So in the EA community it is going to be far more common to believe we have 'duties' to strangers—such as those living in extreme poverty (as our resources can help them a lot) or future people (as they may be so numerous)—than we have duties to our parents who, generally, are pretty well-off.

Larks @ 2025-08-13T02:32 (+2)

I agree that traditional/pure/naive/act utilitarians are not going to believe in any special obligations to parents - the same way they don't believe in special obligations to be honest, or keep promises, or be a good friend. If you object to special obligations to parents because they are 'forc[ing] an unformed, non-consenting minor to sign a binding, life long conflict', you should be much more averse to traditional utilitarianism, which is one of the most totalising moral philosophies. On the other hand, if you want to make modifications to utilitarianism, special treatment for family seems pretty plausible.

JackM @ 2025-08-11T20:13 (+4)

[assuming fertility does not fall as child mortality falls]

Good point. This literature review concludes the following (bold emphasis mine):

I think the best interpretation of the available evidence is that the impact of life-saving interventions on fertility and population growth varies by context, above all with total fertility, and is rarely greater than 1:1 [meaning that averting a death rarely causes a net drop in population]. In places where lifetime births/woman has been converging to 2 or lower, family size is largely a conscious choice, made with an ideal family size in mind, and achieved in part by access to modern contraception. In those contexts, saving one child’s life should lead parents to avert a birth they would otherwise have. The impact of mortality drops on fertility will be nearly 1:1, so population growth will hardly change.

Neel Nanda @ 2025-08-11T08:01 (+4)

Your examples seem disanalogous to me. The key thing here is the claim that people have a lifelong obligation to their parents. Some kind of transactional "you received a bunch of upfront benefits and now have a lifelong debt", and worse, often a debt that's considered impossible to discharge

This is very different from an instantaneous obligation that applies to them at a specific time, or a universal moral obligation to not do harm to an entity regardless of your relationship with them, or an ongoing obligation that is contingent on having a certain status or privileges like residency or citizenship and goes away if you give those up/is gained if you acquire those privileges. Eg, I think that many of the obligations you list would not be considered by most to be obligations if someone who grew up in country A moves to country B - this makes sense if the obligations come from ongoing benefits of residency and no sense of its repaying childhood debt.

To me, residency seems analogous to eg still living with your parents. You are choosing to be in that situation, receive benefits, and have some obligations. There's nothing immoral about moving out, and you have fewer/no obligations afterwards.

Larks @ 2025-08-13T02:25 (+4)

Good comment - I agree this is a meaningful distinction, though I don't think it cuts as strongly as you do.

Firstly, I'm not sure where you are getting 'impossible to discharge' from. If you borrow $100, you would typically discharge that obligation by repaying $100 (plus interest). Similarly, if you believed in natalist obligations to parents, it seems logical that an obligation created by your parents investing say 19 years in raising you, could be discharged by through similar amount of investment.

Secondly, many of the obligations I mentioned cannot easily be avoided either. Moving to another country might get you out of paying taxes in one place, but you'll probably have to pay them in the new place - and some countries like the US will continue to tax you even if you leave! Similarly national service is often based on citizenship, not residency, and obligations like decency and pond intervention cannot be discharged (though I guess you could choose to live in a location with few ponds and very buoyant children).

It's even the case that many people seem to view leaving, and thereby escaping from location-based obligations, as immoral - see for example brain drain criticism, or criticism of fighting-age men for fleeing their country rather than defend it.

I don't mean to take a strong stance here defending any particular one of these obligations. My point is just that a lot of people do believe in them.

Jack_S @ 2025-08-11T13:43 (+10)

I agree with the upfront tagline "Having children is not the most effective way to improve the world", but feel I disagree pretty strongly with a bunch of these takes:

"Owing" it to your parents. This feels a little straw-manned. Wanting to have kids for your parents' sake might be about feeling grateful for 16+ years of love & care, or just making someone you care about happier in their old age. From an EA perspective, you perhaps shouldn't weight this too highly. But when choosing to have kids or not, especially if your parents really want grandchildren, you are making this trade-off. One of my explicit considerations when considering having kids was thinking about my in-laws and extended family.
Donating to AMF to increase population. Don't strongly disagree with the principle here, but donating to AMF is probably not optimal. I think it would be cheaper to incentivise births directly than donating to AMF, if that's your goal. I've written about this: (Who should we pay to increase birth rates?), where I make a toy model about choosing where you might want to generate new lives. I suggest lower-middle income countries other than Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly because of quality of life concerns.
It’s a bad idea to make ethical arguments either way about having children. This one surprised me the most. Do you mean we shouldn’t make these arguments at all, or simply that we should avoid certain impolite judgements of others’ choices? My take: of course you shouldn't overdo it and rant to expectant mothers about the meat-eater problem, risk of population collapse, and negative utilitarianism, but it's still one of the biggest ethical decisions in a human's life. There's no reason why this should be less suitable for ethical debate than what job you choose or what charity you donate to.

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2025-08-10T19:11 (+4)

Thanks for the post, Kat! Agreed.

Patrick Hoang @ 2025-08-11T18:02 (+2)

Some ideas (I am not a parent, but came from a family which had a lot of children. I think my grandmother had 13 kids):

Some people in EA should have kids so it makes EA more friendly to child-bearing parents, especially older professionals who can transition into EA. Look at Julia Wise here and here that one can still be an EA when having kids.

You do have to be careful not letting parenting cost you a lot of impact. For example, if parenting would prevent you from launching new organizations, and launching new orgs would be ridiculously impactful for you, then think twice. However, there are many ways to lower the burden of having kids, such as spending less time micromanaging them. Look at Bryan Caplan's interview with 80k about Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.

Caplan went over how most of the child's behavior are controlled by genes, not by the parent. This allows parents to do 80/20 and do the most cost-effective parenting behavior, if the parents want to raise a good child.

Also, I won't be surprised if the desire to have kids is controlled by genes. If it is, then some people really want kids and others don't, and that is okay. But in rare cases, it could be impactful due to EA optics and productivity reasons (being more energized).

双佳 @ 2025-08-18T08:27 (+1)

I always feel that any critical rejection of whether or not to have children is unethical. People have the freedom to make their own choices, rather than being bound by popular definitions. Whether to have children is not to meet the needs of society, but to have them out of desire or willingness. I don't want to see whether having children becomes a tool for societal moral blackmail

Richard Möhn @ 2025-08-10T08:56 (+1)

What does the research say about the fraction of people who decided on ethical grounds to have/not to have children and then were happy with their choice on emotional grounds vs. regretted their choice?

It might be better to have them for impact and find out that it's great to have them independent of impact than to not have them because one didn't feel like having them. (Similar to my experience. I think babies are gross rather than cute. Only my own baby is cute.)