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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2024
Parental care in humans is remarkably extensive, with many individuals living only a fraction of their lives outside of the sphere of parental influence, and parental care is exceptionally plastic, with the extent and form of care varying across contexts and individuals. Behavioral ecological studies of parenting fall into three main foci. First, parental care is studied in terms of life history tradeoffs, including between mating and parenting effort, and between fertility and investment per offspring. Second, parental care is studied as a conflict trait, including sibling conflict, parent-offspring conflict, and sexual conflict between mothers and fathers. Finally, parental investment theory addresses how individual characteristics, such as birth order, sex and putative relatedness, influence parental strategies. For each focus, predictions are context-specific with socioecology dictating the local costs and payoffs to parental care. Over 50 years of behavioral ecological studies of parenting have transformed understandings of the human family, exposing the fragile mix of cooperation and competition underlying family relationships. Questions remain, however, particularly with regard to parental strategies in nonnuclear family structures, the role of physiological, psychological and cultural mechanisms in regulating adaptive strategies, and the coevolution of parental care with culturally variable beliefs about kinship, gender and reproduction.
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