Original Article
Fostering relations: first sex and marital timings for children raised by kin and non-kin carers,☆☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.12.002Get rights and content
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Abstract

Kinship fostering is generally preferred to non-kin fostering by policy makers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Researchers and policy makers alike tend to provide several proximate reasons for why this may be, generally neglecting an ultimate evolutionary framework. However, kin selection theory predicts that in the absence of genetically related parents, care from kin will result in the most similar life history outcomes. In low-fertility settings, parents typically favour increased investment in embodied capital and thus delayed reproductive life history strategy. Using archival data from the original Kinsey survey, collected in the U.S. from 1938 to 1963, we used survival analyses to compare the effects of living with kin and non-kin fosterers in childhood on timings of first sex and marriage. Our results support a kin selection hypothesis showing that while fostered children have accelerated life histories compared to children from “intact families”, kin fosterers buffer children from early sexual and reproductive behaviors, compared to children cared for by non-kin.

Keywords

Kinship fostering
Kin selection
Sexual behavior

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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Author note: Data from the original Kinsey surveys are archived and available at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, at Indiana University, Bloomington. Those interested in using these data should contact User Services at The Kinsey Institute Library to obtain current application materials for use of archives and special collections.

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These authors contributed equally to this work; author order was randomly assigned by flipping a coin.