Men and women have differing parental investments in their offspring and certainty of paternity plays a role in their parental investment (Trivers 1972). The sex with parental certainty is more likely to invest resources in their offspring than the sex with parental uncertainty. As a consequence of paternal uncertainty, men are more likely to leave their offspring and forego investment, shifting greater responsibility onto women to care for the offspring (Trivers 1972). Since it takes a considerable amount of resources to rear a child, women typically seek child support from men who do this. But, many men do not pay their child support. Consequently, child support enforcement policies were expanded and were more stringently enforced beginning in the twenty-first century in the hope of improving children’s lives (Pirog and Ziol-Guest 2006; Wilson 2002). This shift is important because the mental and physical health of a child is impaired when the child does not live with both...
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Joel Wade, T., Salerno, K., Moran, J. (2018). Child Support. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2019-1
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