Chapter 10: Parenting Strategies and Kin Selection
Chapter Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to
- Identify differences between modern parenting and evolutionary caregiving.
- Describe how parenting strategies vary between species and sexes.
- Distinguish between parenting, alloparenting, and allomaternal care.
- Understand Hamilton’s Rule and how it impacts kin selection and phenotypic matching.
- Recognize modernity’s impact on life history trade-offs and reproductive decision-making.
Chapter Introduction
The evolutionary history of caregiving looks quite different than modern parenting. This is due to the influence of cultural expectations to raise children who are competitive in a vastly different environment than the EEA. In many of today’s cultures, students must achieve high marks in school, be socially responsible at increasingly early ages, and be capable of attaining status through actions – sometimes as early as first grade.
Children in foraging societies, like Hadzabe, can provide a lens into our past. Though completely modern humans, their lifestyle is incredibly different than, say, children in the United States. By age four or five, Hadzabe children may be gathering berries and supplementing their own diets. By the time boys reach puberty, they are learning to hunt and even climb trees for honey. As girls approach puberty, they are already helping raise siblings, gather tubers, and preparing for the obligations of motherhood.
Neither of these is right nor wrong. They are simply different. Yet, there is one, crucial similarity in human parenting – regardless of culture – and that is the need for extended family and support.
In this chapter, we will unpack the concept of parental investment and cooperative breeding. In doing so, we take a look at the important concept of alloparenting and consider how changes in human societies and living conditions impact this behavior. But first, we need to understand how we get the energy to do all these things. We begin with a bit of Life History Theory.
