Parenting: Things I wish I could tell my past self

Abstract

I have a baby who’s nearly 10 months old. I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to be able to go back and tell myself before I embarked on this journey. I suspect that some of the differences between how I experienced it and what I had read in books correlates with ways that other effective altruists might also experience things. I also generally felt that finding decent no-nonsense information about parenting was hard, and that the signal to noise ratio when googling for answers was peculiarly bad. Probably the most useful advice I got was from EA friends with kids. So I thought it might be useful to jot down some thoughts for other EAs likely to have kids soon (or hoping to support others who are!).