Faith Florer wrote:
> I would think that the number of children killed or abused by adoptive
> parents would be crucial to an argument about the relationship between
> biological relatedness and violence towards a child in the household. A
> step parent is a parent as a result of marriage. Adoptive parents, like
> many biological parents, choose to parent the child. In this country,
> becoming an adoptive parent is quite a demanding procedure. I'd be
> surprised if the rate of abuse was as high in adoptive parents as in
> biological parents. I'd imagine that it's lower. If so, that would refute
> the evolutionary perspective.
>
> I also wonder whether the statistics about the 'biological parents'
> inadvertently include adoptive parents because birth records are changed so
> that adoptive parents look like the biological ones on paper.
>
> In general, I have a hard time accepting the evolutionary supposition that
> biological relatedness predisposes people to care for a particular child
> based on statistics comparing step parents to everyone else. First of all,
> step parents end up as parents as a function of another relationship
> (marriage). Furthermore, how can you control for the factor of the stress
> of the divorce on the second marriage? You would need to compare step
> parents with biological parents who were divorced from a previous partner,
> who yet had an ongoing relationship withpartner about children, I would
> think.
<snip>
The data on adoptive parents would be useful, though there are confounds that would
pull the data in conflicting directions. On the one hand, adopting parents will be
wealthier and more invested into the _role_ of parenting - factors that should be
associated with decreased abuse/murder. On the other hand, children who are given
up for adoption are more likely to have problems. Evidence suggests less parental
investment in children with, for instance, congenital problems. So comparisons of
adopting parents vs biological vs stepparents would have to be done with these
cautions.
That children suffer more at the hands of step parents more than biological is not
an isolated finding. There are a host of other data that collectively support an
evolutionary perspective. Altruism and helping behavior increases with genetic
relatedness (despite the existence of both to strangers - but altruism to strangers
is more likely to get our attention). Money bequeathed in wills should a direct
correlation with genetic relatedness. Students get more college money from bio
parents than step parents (they are 5.5X more likely to receive college money at
all). It is also true that attention and caring between relatives is higher when
the lines of relatedness are maternal (e.g. your mother's sister) rather than
paternal (e.g. your father's sister), presumably because of "paternal
uncertainty." So the evolutionary perspective doesn't depend on any one study. The
results collectively point to a role for evolutionary adaptations modulating family
relations and patterns of care. For too long, imo, parenting has been viewed by
researchers as a purely "social role" unadorned by biological concerns. btw, David
Buss' _Evolutionary Psychology_ (1999) text summarizes this literature well.
--
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John W. Kulig [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology http://oz.plymouth.edu/~kulig
Plymouth State College tel: (603) 535-2468
Plymouth NH USA 03264 fax: (603) 535-2412
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"What a man often sees he does not wonder at, although he knows
not why it happens; if something occurs which he has not seen before,
he thinks it is a marvel" - Cicero.
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