Definition
The investment (e.g., time, emotional closeness, material resources) a grandparent allocates to a grandchild.
Introduction
The finding that parental solicitude is sex specific, with mothers investing more in their offspring than fathers (Daly and Wilson 1980), can be extended to grandparental solicitude. According to the life history theory, persons can maximize their reproductive success by parental effort, but also by their nepotistic effort (supporting persons with whom they share genes by common descent). Thus, grandparents can maximize their long-term reproductive success by allocating their grandparental effort discriminatively.
Preferential Grandparental Solicitude: Theory
Euler and Weitzel (1996) hypothesized that the amount of discriminative grandparental investment can be predicted by two sex-specific reproductive factors: (1) Because of their higher obligatory investment into each...
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References
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Euler, H.A. (2016). Euler and Weitzel (1996). In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1190-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1190-1
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