When parental care hurts: Extended parental care and the evolution of overparenting

In recent years, childrearing in high-income countries has become described as ‘relentless’ in its demands on parents. In response to growing delays in social and financial independence, public health professionals have even advocated for redefining adulthood to begin at later ages. There is also growing concern, not just about the wellbeing of exhausted parents, but of children whose parents are deemed to provide developmentally inappropriate care that may undermine their independence and foster poor mental health. In this review, we describe such ‘overparenting’, an intensive style of modern parenting considered costly to both parent and offspring wellbeing, as a phenomenon of increasing public health relevance, before putting these concerns into an evolutionary framework. We characterize overparenting as an extreme and maladaptive continuation of trends in extended parental care that have characterized much of human (evolutionary) history, highlighting four relevant socioecological shifts hypothesized to incentivize increases in parental care: (i) lowering extrinsic risk, (ii) increased reliance on skill-intensive production, (iii) escalating intergenerational wealth transfers and (iv) reduced availability of alloparents. From this perspective overparenting within high-income countries presents an underappreciated example of evolutionary mismatch to prevailing socioecological conditions. To conclude, we discuss how an evolutionary perspective on overparenting may help promote new research directions and inform the design of initiatives aimed at improving both parent and child wellbeing.