Being Cared for and Growing Up Slowly: Parenting Slows Human Life History

SYNOPSISObjective. For most animals, extrinsic mortality risks drive a fast life history (LH) strategy in which animals disregard risks and accelerate reproduction. Instead of perpetuating mortality driving fast LH, humans have reduced almost all mortality risks in living environments, resulting in a significant slowing of LH. Additionally, humans exhibit invested parenting which entails teaching their young survival or mortality reduction skills. Could parenting provide an additional pathway to the development and slowing of human LH? Design. Data reported here come from interviews and questionnaires administered to a community sample of 286 rural Chinese parents and their children when the children were on average 7, 8, and 11 years old. Results. Parental acceptance statistically mediates and moderates the longitudinal association between environmental adversities and children’s LH. Conclusions. Parenting breaks the species-general contingency between mortality conditions and fast offspring LH strategies and provides an additional pathway to the development and slowing of human LH. AFFILIATIONS AND ADDRESSESLei Chang, Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Building E21, Avenida da Universidade, Taipa, Macau, China. Email: chang@um.edu.mo. Hui Jing Lu is at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. An Ting Yang, Yuan Yuan Liu, and Nan Zhu are at University of Macau.ARTICLE INFORMATIONConflict of interest disclosuresEach author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.Ethical principlesThe authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.Role of the funders/sponsorsNone of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by a General Research Fund [15608415] from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.