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Welcome 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 experience of returning to work after having a baby, published by rosehadshar on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. My first child was born in January 2021. In October 2021, I returned to work part time after ~9 months of parental leave. In this post, I want to share my experience of returning to work. I hope this might help potential parents to think about what working might ideally look like for them if/when they have a baby. A few caveats: Context matters a lot. I’m the main carer for my child, though I’m not a single parent, I took 9 months off work completely, and then went back to work 0.5FTE. Independently of my own salary I am financially well-off, and I have a strong EA network. I’m particularly mindful that if I had had less money, some of the choices I made wouldn’t have been available to me. Parental preference matters a lot. For basically all of the below I can imagine great parents having different preferences to me. Age. My child is 1 year old and I have no idea what things are like with older children (or multiple children). What follows are the main things I notice about my own experience of returning to work. I’ve put the points in rough chronological order. As I want to convey the texture of my experiences, not just factual points, I’ve gone into a fair bit of detail. I suggest you skim the headings, and read those which sound interesting/relevant to you. I found it hard to predict when I’d want to return to work Before I had a baby, I guessed I would want to take 6 months off. Once the baby arrived, I thought maybe I would never go back to work. I found looking after him very fulfilling, and the horizons of my world contracted. I knew that x-risk was still a thing, but it seemed very far away and a bit unreal. I cared a lot more about caring for my family than about saving the world, and also had a much clearer sense of how to do the former than the latter. When my baby was around 7 months old, I relatively suddenly started to want to work again. This change happened over about 2 weeks. Partly this was triggered by me having a few conversations with friends I hadn’t seen for a while. They had interesting things to say about their work and the world, and I wanted to have that too. The experience was a bit like part of my brain turning back on. Suddenly I was interested in something beyond my family, and had ideas and thoughts and questions again. This change roughly coincided with my baby sleeping a bit better at night. It’s plausible to me that really-sleep-deprived-me doesn’t have the capacity to think about much, and only-mildly-sleep-deprived-me does. See this post for another parent who found it hard to predict when they’d want to return. Switching jobs was easier than I expected Before having a baby, I worked as a project manager at a research organisation. Originally I planned to return to this job, but when it came to it, changes at the organisation made me think that I’d find the work too stressful. So unexpectedly I found myself looking for work after a 9 month break. There were things about this that I expected to be hard: It was difficult to make progress finding work before I had childcare, but I also wanted to have work so I could pay for the childcare. I hadn’t been thinking about work stuff for a long time, and I was out of the loop in terms of what others were working on and excited about. Relative to pre-baby-me, I felt much less risk tolerant in a few different ways: I had less emotional bandwidth for work, as Having a child contributed to me wanting to buy a house. Having a permanent salary is useful for getting a mortgage, so I suddenly found I had new preferences about how I was paid. I wanted to switch career path, or at least try out different kinds of work. I didn’t have strong track record in the things ...