ABSTRACT
Species success depends on parental success, across numberless generations. Ultimately a species can survive only when its parenting aptitudes, as genetically directed, ensure the survival and maturation of children who will in turn raise their own viable children to be successful parents. The dialectical relationship between infantile freedom and parental constraint is registered by most successful human groups in that they bring about a clear identity between mature adulthood and parenthood. Indeed, contemporary American society is one of the few in which a major attempt has been made to split adulthood from the parental condition. The chapter shows that the parental imperative orders not only the maturations that precede the reproductive years but also those that come about when that period has ended. If human development is organized by two great principles—being parented in childhood and being parental in adulthood—then the child's reproductive destiny should organize even aspects of its early experience and the forms of rearing that it gets.
