Family and Relationships Flashcards
Parental Investments
Great Plains toad
Male grip female tightly around her abdomen until she releases eggs - male release his sperm to ferilize eggs - use feet to hold eggs in place - never interact again
Frontosa -
fish living in lake tanganyika - mother carries offspring in mouth from fertilization through mobility - mother will not eat - brooding
Adelie penguin -
- travel 3000 miles to the nesting site used previously - make nest - lay egg - take turns incubating - if they leave it exposed it will never hatch
Prolonged childhood/period of dependence is an evolutionary result of our complex social lives
Not all species have childhood/juvenile period
Among primates - length of juvenile period is related to adult brain size
What was it that took humans so long to learn?
Best explanation is social cognitive hypothesis - neocortex size correlates with the length of the juvenile period rather than with gestational period, lactation period or the reproductive lifespan
juvenile period - adolescence
Extremely protracted developmental period including adolescence
Adolescence is unique to humans - period after reproductive maturity when an individual is still dependent on parents
Functional in species that specializes in information and cognition - longer time period allows for the development of our complex human social cognition - function of adolescence is specifically social development
maternal/biparental care
Families are rate among non-human animals - in most species individuals are self-sufficient after a brief period of maternal care - lasting maternal relationship is not seen in most species
Biparental care is uncommon
Families as Systems
Human family is part of a system and is a system itself
Continuous bidirectional interaction
Systems are characterized by multiple and continuous interactions among the elements of the system
Microsystem:
Birth order, temperament, sex, health, and intelligence can influence his or her own development and family.
The immediate family - Each family member impacts each other family member, as is characteristic of a system
Mesosystem
Effects that emerge due to interactions in the microsystem
Quality of parents marriage
How well parents work together
Divorce
Exosystem
Elements that the child does not interact with directly but still impact the child - parents workplace - source of family’s resources and events at the workplace can have an effect on the disposition of the parents
Parental Love and Investment
Happens cross culturally
Parental love is deeply consuming, and parental investment occurs cross-culturally
Parent will make a tremendous investment in a child - food time money - instinct blindness as to why
Parental investment theory
He stressed the evolutionary basis of parental behavior, including the extensive investment parents make in their offspring
Parental Investment: Any investment by a parent in an individual offspring that increases that offspring’s chance of surviving and reproducing at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring.
Parental love that humans feel as well as the irritation and frustration that a parent might feel toward a child, are parts of psychological processes that calibrate the level of parental investment a parent is willing to make in a particular child.
Inclusive Fitness:
One’s evolutionary fitness plus the number of viable offspring of relatives, discounted by relatedness. For example, one gets full credit for oneself, half credit for offspring or siblings, and a quarter credit for nieces or nephews.
partial credit one gets in natural selection for the reproductive success of one’s close genetic relatives.
Alloparents:
All of the people who contribute to the upbringing of a child other than the child’s parents
A child’s chance of survival increases when mother has help, and a maternal grandmother is the most effective help in terms of child survivorship
alloparents - Some forms of contributions are rather indirect - Ache,
Some forms of contributions are rather indirect. For example, among the Ache, hunter-gatherers in the forests of Paraguay, mothers of young children forage less, but their deficit is made up for by the foraging of other women, especially relatives
Hrdy - Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis
Natural selection has shaped a cooperative breeding system among humans in which mothers were not along in rearing their children but shared responsibilities with close female kin and friends - with help women can have a new baby even when the older sibling still needs adult care
Hrdy - Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis
Evidence - exists throughout human societies
Efé of Central America as an example. An infant born among the Efé is held by adults other than his mother on his first day of life. A three-week old already spends 40% of daytime hours with alloparents, and by the time the baby is 18 weeks old, he is spending 60% of his daytime hours with alloparents
Not the amount of time the mother spent with the child but the extent to which the child felt safe and secure when not with the mother
Fathers
Mothers invest more than fathers
Only 5% of species have any paternal investment
Woman begins by investing 9m in gestation and then she is obliged to invest 2-4 more in breast-feeding
Mothers tend to spend the next decade investing heavily in an individual child and the rest of her life investing to a lesser extent
Father investment is important to raising a child who is healthy and competitive with peers - fathers investment is not obligatory - fathers are playing an increasing role in child rearing
Childcare responsibilities traditionally fell on mother - still true today
Alloparents tend to be
Alloparents tend to be the mothers relatives - because mothers genetic connection is more certain than the fathers
Grandmother hypothesis -
- important species specific evolution was made possible in human history when grandmothers began feeding newly-weaned children foods that would not otherwise be accessible to them.
Decreases infant mortality
If grandmother is present to make these foods accessible to a newly weaned child then weaning can happen earlier and mothers interbirth interval decreases - increasing mothers fitness and grandmother/child inclusive fitness
A grandmother’s contribution, according to this hypothesis, also supports the child’s longer period of development and ultimately the larger brains and cognitive specialization seen in human
Brain size is also correlated with duration of
Brain size is also correlated with duration of nursing (time to weaning) and humans wean much earlier than would be expected based on brain size and correlation
Grandmothers involvement in feeding that allows this early weaning
Menopause
Menopause as an adaptation that allows for extended lifespan and increased inclusive fitness via grandparental investment
Pregnancy in older women - higher miscarriage rates, stillborn, maternal death and low birth weight compared to pregnancy in younger women
Menopause - shift in strategy from parenting to grandparenting due to a shift in the risk to benefit ratio
Increase inclusive fitness by ceasing reproduction and investing in grand child
Hadza - traditional foraging society in africa
presence of a grandmother does contribute to the success of the grandchildren
Grandmothers foraging - provides crucial nutrition for young children who were no longer nursing but who were not yet eating adult food
mother was still nursing a younger sibling, the health of the weaned child was predicted by the foraging of the grandmother
mother was free to wean her older child at a younger age, trusting that his grandmother would contribute to his nutrition, allowing the mother to become pregnant with her next child. This increases the grandmother’s inclusive fitness by reducing her daughter’s birth interval
Tsimane - forager horticulturalists in the bolivian amazon
not only are grandparents able to pass wealth and resources on to grandchildren in a way that increases fitness, but they are able to manage resources in response to the sex, relatedness, and even the productivity of the recipient.
All of these variables were taken into account in order to maximize the grandparents’ inclusive fitness
Stepparents
Would not have been uncommon in EEA - losing a parent was possible - finding a new mate was a good strategy
Not psychologically the same as a parent - only 53% of stepfathers and 25% of stepmothers report feeling any parental feelings for their step children
stepfathers reported weaker feelings for stepchildren than for their own children
stepfathers spend significantly less time with their stepchildren, about three hours a week less, than with their biological children and are less likely to help their stepchildren with homework than they are to help bio children
Parallels in traditional societies
Hadza
Hadza - cared for their biological children more than for their stepchildren, as measured by the amount of time spent together.
Biological fathers - more time near their children - communicated more, held, fed, cleaned more than stepfather
Stepfathers never seen playing with step child
childrens mortality rates_______________if their widowed mother remarried
increased
Trivers’ parental investment perspective - stepparent
a stepparent would not be expected to invest in stepchildren to the extent that the child’s biological parent invests since investing in this unrelated child does not directly increase the stepparent’s inclusive fitness
The cognitive machinery that allows us to subjugate our interests completely to another individual is, in fact, a set of adaptations that will be passed to the next generation by the genes that underlie their development. It is thus easy to see that conflict would be predicted in stepparent and stepchild relationships, and indeed, such conflict is found in studies of stepfamilies.
crime and stepparents
rate of murders committed by stepfathers against children residing with them is hundreds of times higher than the rate for fathers against their biological children’s
and children are 40 times more likely to be abused if they live with a stepparent than if they live in a home with two biological parents
Stepchildren are more likely to be abused, where abuse includes battery, sexual abuse, and murder
when stepparents are physically abusive in the home, they are likely to be abusive only to their stepchildren and not to their own offspring. One study, for example, showed that abuse was directed exclusively toward the stepchild in 19 out of 22 abusive families
Resembling Dad
Evolutionary
one of most serious risks to a man in a high paternal-investment society is to unknowingly invest in another mans child when he raises his wife’s offspring
Infant has to solicit parental care at least from the mother and if possible from the father too
Mother knows the child is hers - father believes it to be his
New born babies are said to resemble their fathers more than they are said to resemble their mothers. Furthermore, it is the mother who is more likely than the father to assert that the newborn baby looks like the father, presumably in order to reassure the father that he is, indeed, the baby’s father.
Maternal relatives are twice as likely as paternal relatives to say that the newborn baby resembles the father compared to the mother
looking more like dad when and how
Surprisingly, at the age of 1 year, photos of babies can be matched with photos of their fathers more easily than they can be matched with photos of their mothers
babies might have adaptations to solicit resources from dad, who might be uncertain about his relationship to the baby, as opposed to mom, who is certain of her relationship to the baby
Photo morphing technology - morphed photos of the participant with photos of children selected at random
Which child would you punish more severely, which one would you adopt - men were biased - choose child that resembled them in response to the positive questions
Women showed no bias - consistent with the idea that men, and not women, may have evolved psychological processes designed to protect them against cuckoldry
Siblings
Initial reaction to hearing you will be getting a sibling is usually positive
Older sibling is typically distress and may withdraw or show regressive immaturity, competition once sibling arrives
Older sibling important role in the development of the younger sibling - by the time the younger sibling turns 4 - talks more with older sibling than parent
Older comforts younger when distressed and in some cultures provides care
Teach culture, games and life skills