2015•The International Encyclopedia of Human SexualityRequires access
Parent–offspring conflict
Daniel M. Traficonte, Dario Maestripieri
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Abstract
Parent–offspring conflict theory, formulated by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in 1974, maintains that parents and offspring should disagree over the amount of parental resources invested in the offspring so that offspring should always demand more than parents are willing to invest. This disagreement reflects an underlying genetic conflict of interest: while parents are equally related to all of their offspring and predisposed to invest equally in them, each individual offspring is fully related to itself but only half related to its siblings. Parent–offspring conflict has been documented in both animals and humans and is expressed physiologically during gestation and at the behavioral and psychological level after birth.