First published 1987 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010031991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parenting acrossthe life span : biosocial dimensions / Jane B. Lancaster ... [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Originally published: New York : A. de Gruyter, c1987.
ISBN 978-0-202-36382-0 (alk. paper)
1. Parenthood. 2. Life cycle, Human. 3. Parent and child. I. Lancaster, Jane Beckman, 1935-
HQ755.8.P379 2010
306.874-dc22
2010031991
ISBN 13: 978-0-202-36382-0 (pbk)
Contents
Jane B. Lancaster, Jeanne Altmann, Alice S. Rossi, Lonnie R. Sherrod
Jeanne Altmann
Alice S. Rossi
Michael Leon
Michael E. Lamb, Joseph H. Pleck, Eric L. Charnov, James A. Levine
James J. McKenna
Jane B. Lancaster, Chet S. Lancaster
Patricia Draper, Henry Harpending
Thomas S. Weisner
Robert A. LeVine, Merry White
Maris A. Vinovskis
Dennis P. Hogan
Judith Blake
Richard M. Lerner, Jacqueline V. Lerner
Gunhild O. Hagestad
Vern L Bengtson
This volume was the second in a series sponsored by the Social Science Research Councils Committee on Biosocial Perspectives on Parent Behavior and Offspring Development.
The Committee, formed in 1980, was a multidisciplinary group of biological, behavioral, and social scientists who sought to promote an exchange of concepts, theory, methods, and data across our disciplines. The first volume produced by this collaboration was School-Age Pregnancy and Parenthood: Biosocial Dimensions, edited by Jane Lancaster and Beatrix Hamburg (Aldine, 1986) and recently republished by Aldine Transaction in 2008.
The current volume, Parenting Across the Life Span was published in 1987, the product of an editorial collaboration by Jane Lancaster, Jane Altmann, Alice Rossi and Lonnie Sherrod. The time was right to bring together the modern biological and behavioral sciences that were investing time, energy and resources into following individuals, birth cohorts, and local populations of both animals and humans through long periods, many of which represented the length of a generation or even a life span. At the same time new theoretical models from evolutionary biology produced a series of integrative concepts from life history theory such as life history strategies and tactics, parental investment theory, mate choice, and the allocation of energy and resources to major features of life history such as growth, development, the finding and number of mates, the timing, number and investment in offspring, immune competence, and aging.
The chapters of this book are characterized by their comparative dimensions: cross-species (evolutionary and biological), cross-cultural, and cross-time (historical and developmental). They confront a series of major issues in the theory of evolution of human life history: parenthood as a life-span commitment; the value of the concepts of inclusive fitness and parental investment strategies in explaining species patterns of parenting; the sensitivity of parental investment strategies to the social and environmental context to which they are adapted; and major evolutionary and historic changes of that context in which parental behavior is currently expressed.
Today, the fifteen chapters of the book remain as fresh and significant as they were twenty-three years ago. This is not to say that the field has languished for all those years. Indeed, far from it. Listed below are a sample of books published during this decade that rest on the interdisciplinary perspective first described in this volume: an evolutionary, cross-cultural, biological, behavioral and historical foundation for the understand parenting across the life span.
Jane B. Lancaster
References
Ellison, P.T. (2001). Reproductive Ecology and Human Evolution. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Ellison, P.T. (2001). On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Ellison, P.T. and P.B. Gray, eds. (2009). The Endocrinology of Social Relationships. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Hawkes, K., and R. R. Paine, eds. (2006). The Evolution of Human Life History. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
Howell, N. (2010). Life Histories of the Dobe !Kung: Food, Fatness, and Well-Being over the Life Span. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.
Hrdy, S.B. (2009). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Konner, M. (2010). The Evolution of Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lancy, D.F., J. Bock, and S. Gaskins, eds. (2010). The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Low, Bobbi (2001). Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Salmon, C.A. and T.K. Shackelford, eds. (2007). Family Relationships: An Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.
Voland, E. A. Chasiotic, A. and W. Schiefenhovel (2005). Grandmotherhood: The Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of the Female Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Worthman, C.M., P.M. Plotsky, D.S. Schechter, and C.A. Cummings, eds. (2010). Formative Experiences: The Interaction of Caregving, Culture, and Developmental Psychobiology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
