What is it about?

Frans de Waal predicted that evolutionary thinking would become the main way of explaining human behaviour. This article looks at how far that has happened for child and family studies, the field behind parenting support, child welfare and youth care.

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Why is it important?

Research on how children develop from an evolutionary point of view has grown strongly since the early 2000s. But it has barely reached child and family studies, or the professionals who work with children and families. This article argues for an “evolutionary pedagogy” that connects the two. It places child-rearing in the long evolutionary history of our species, without ignoring social and cultural influences. Because humans have always raised children cooperatively, with help from more people than just the parents, advice for families should reflect that.

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Without this link, the field risks overestimating how much children can be shaped and how much parenting alone determines how they turn out. An evolutionary perspective gives a more realistic picture of children and of the shared nature of caregiving.

J.N. Koppies

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This page is a summary of: Raising primates: Frans de Waal and the underrepresentation of evolutionary perspectives in child and family studies, Behaviour, October 2026, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/1568539x-bja10395.
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