Non-Parental Investment in Children and Child Outcomes after Parental Death or Divorce in a Patrilocal Society

Abstract

Children rely on support from parental helpers (alloparents), perhaps especially in high-needs contexts. Considerable evidence indicates that closer relatives and maternal relatives are the most likely to provide this care, as inclusive fitness theory suggests, but whether this is equally true across different family types and in culturally patrilocal societies requires investigation. This structured interview study (N = 208 respondents with 323 dependent children) focuses on who helps raise children in rural Bangladesh after the father’s or mother’s death, or divorce, in comparison to families with both parents present or the father temporarily a migrant laborer. Family types differed in where and with whom children resided, who served as their primary and secondary caregivers, and who provided material support, but mother’s kin played a major role, and were the primary providers of material resources from outside the child’s household in all family types. Despite the patrilineal ideology, only one-quarter of children of divorce lived with the father or his family, and even after the death of the mother, only 59% remained with father or other paternal kin. Household income varied by family type and was a strong predictor of child height and weight. The children of deceased mothers moved between successive caregivers especially frequently, and were uniquely likely to have no schooling. The typology of Bangladeshi society as patrilocal obscures the extent to which matrilateral family support children’s well-being.

Matrilateral bias of grandparental investment in grandchildren persists despite the grandchildren's adverse early life experiences

“…This literature has also argued that grandparental investment will increase (or compensate) in response to adverse life events in a grandchild's family when the recipient's need for help is higher [23][24][25]. For example, grandparents have been found to allocate their help to their kin with the greater need [26], and they have been found to be particularly important for grandchildren if there is a severe illness or death of a family member ( particularly of the mother), parental divorce, financial hardship in the family, or if the grandchild experiences behavioural problems or harsh parenting [27][28][29][30][31][32]. Ultimately, in the case of the greatest need when parents are not available, grandparents become the primary caretakers of their grandchildren, providing the largest investment [33].…”

In-Law Relationships in Evolutionary Perspective: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

“…It is conceivable that the apparent in-law effects result from a confound whereby the households in which mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law co-resided were relatively poor. Data from GP's interviewees, however, suggest that any such confounding is likely to be slight, because the means and distributions of household incomes (adjusted for household size) were similar for those who did and those who did not reside with the mother-in-law (Perry, 2021).…”

“…In April and May, 2014, the authors were located at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) in Matlab, Bangladesh, where one of us (GP) was conducting interview research on alloparental care and assistance (Perry, 2017a;Perry, 2017b;Perry, 2021). In the Bengali society of Bangladesh and adjacent northeast India, it is normative that a young bride should move into her husband's natal family home at marriage, and abuse and exploitation of women by their mothers-in-law is a widely acknowledged problem (e.g., Aziz, 1985;Rohner and Chaki-Sirkar, 1988;Bates et al, 2004).…”

Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families

“…Alloparenting is more than simply providing help to mothers; it can also involve the replacement of support if a parent dies or is absent due to divorce. In this issue, Perry (2021) demonstrates that among patrilineal families in rural Bangladesh, maternal kin frequently provide support to children who are left without a parent, even if that parent is the mother. However, alloparents are only partly able to mitigate the cost of losing a mother in this context; maternal orphans moved between numerous kin-carers and were more likely to have never attended school.…”