ABSTRACT
Child and developmental psychologists, sociologists, educators, and policy makers have long viewed parenting and the family as the most significant influence on the developing child. This chapter provides an evolutionary view of human parenting. It reviews the basic tenets of evolution by natural selection and some of the major ideas of the field of evolutionary psychology, particularly evolutionary developmental psychology. The chapter then examines a more specific evolutionary theory, Trivers's parental investment theory, which accounts for the amount of investment females and males put into parenting. Yet, parenting straddles the nature side of the traditional continuum. Parenting is not only important to humans, but it is central to the survival of many species of animals, including all mammals and many birds. Natural selection is a highly interactive process, involving an active organism’s response to a sometimes changing environment.
