The “ Cinderella effect ” : Elevated mistreatment of stepchildren in comparison to those living with genetic parents

Parents commit a huge amount of time, attention and material resources to the care of their children, as well as incurring life-threatening risks to defend them and bodily depletion to nourish them. Why are parents motivated to invest so heavily in their children? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer is surely that natural selection has favoured intensive parental care in our lineage. Those ancestral genotypes and phenotypes that best succeeded in raising children to become reproducing adults were the ones that persisted and proliferated.