#248 Todd Shackelford & Viviana Weekes-Shackelford: Mating After Children
Dr. Todd Shackelford is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology at Oakland University, as well as the Co-Director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab there. He is the editor in chief of the academic journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.
Dr. Viviana Weekes-Shackelford received her Ph.D. in evolutionary developmental psychology in 2011 from Florida Atlantic University. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Sociology and Criminal Justice at Oakland University and Co-Director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab. Her research over the years has been evolutionarily inspired and has had the broader goal of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of violence and conflict in families and romantic relationships. Her research interests and record cut across the psychological domains of forensics, development, social, personality, clinical, and criminology.
In this episode, we talk about what happens in people’s mating lives after they have children. We talk about the trade-offs people need to make between mating and parenting. We refer to how children might get exposed to more violence from stepparents, and how women don’t necessarily need men to raise children adequately. We also discuss how men tend to be more violent, even toward their own children, and the issue of differential investment by paternal and maternal grandparents. We then go into the ways having children might affect their parents’ romantic relationship, and how there are different outcomes for different couples. We also talk about the several ways single parents (both men and women) might see their mate value decrease. Toward the end we also speculate a bit, and discuss why children probably don’t interfere with their parents having more children, and why witnessing their parents having sex and seeing naked people probably does not have a negative impact on children.
Time Links:
Mating after having children
The trade-off between mating and parenting
Women don’t necessarily need men to raise children
Are men more violent than women toward their children?
Grandparental investment
The ways having children might affect the parents’ romantic relationship
Different outcomes for different couples
Could sexual activity within couples fluctuate over time?
How having children affects the parent’s mate value
Could children interfere with their parents’ reproduction?
Could it be the case that children establish more solid relationships with their mothers?
Could watching their parents having sex have some negative effect on children’s minds?
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Twitter handle (Todd): @TKShackelford