In these intergenerational negotiations offspring will have less incentive to help the remaining parent rear future half-siblings relative to beginning reproduction themselves. Family members often help each other reproduce, meaning that parents and offspring may find themselves in competition over reproductive opportunities. In this paper we discuss a neglected hypothesis that early reproduction is often associated with parental absence because it decreases the average relatedness of a developing child to her future siblings. These results are counterintuitive for evolutionary social scientists because reductions in parental investment should be detrimental for offspring, but earlier reproduction is generally associated with higher fitness. Parental absences in childhood are often associated with accelerated reproductive maturity in humans. Intergenerational conflicts may help explain parental absence effects on reproductive timing: a model of age at first birth in humans. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Department of Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom DOI 10.7717/peerj.512 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Jennifer Wagner Subject Areas Animal Behavior, Anthropology, Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology Keywords Cooperative breeding, Life history theory, Intergenerational conflict, Father absence, Helpers at the nest, Mother absence, Reproductive decision-making, Kin competition, Parental investment, Senescence Copyright © 2014 Moya and Sear Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed.
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