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Definition
This section covers the theoretical considerations and existing data relevant to studying mate preferences after having children.
Introduction
Children dominate their parents’ time and energy and siphon a significant portion of their accrued resources. Although having children changes people’s lives substantially, the extent to which people’s mate preferences change after having children is unclear. The current chapter will address theoretical considerations important to developing hypotheses about mate preferences after having children and will summarize existing relevant data. First, because provisioning and caring for children was a recurrent adaptive problem, human mating psychology may have evolved to calibrate mate preferences to motivate the pursuit of partners who are able and willing to contribute resources and parenting effort and who will not pose a threat to existing children. Any shifts in...
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Goetz, C. (2016). Mate Preferences after Having Children. 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_15-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_15-1
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