good mother hypothesis

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• Exploring the good mother hypothesis: Do child outcomes vary with the mother’s share of income?

Authors: M. Dooley , Jennifer M. Stewart , and Ellen L. Lipman

Abstract (English)

We explore the relationship between child outcomes and the source of family income using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The good mother hypothesis asserts that consumption of child-specific goods and child well-being may be superior in families in which mothers have greater control over economic resources. The least squares and logit estimates do not indicate that child activities and cognitive and behavioural/emotional outcomes are associated with the mother’s share of income, but the fixed effects models provide some evidence of modest effects.

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• M. Dooley , Jennifer M. Stewart , and Ellen L. Lipman
• Canadian Public Policy

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The good mother [electronic resource] : contemporary motherhoods in Australia

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• Acknowledgements About the authors
• 1. The good mother in theory and research: an overview Susan Goodwin and Kate Huppatz
• 2. Good executive, good mother: contradictory devotions Colleen Chesterman and Anne Ross-Smith
• 3. Mother of all constructions: mothers in male-dominated work Louisa Smith
• 4. Mothers making class distinctions: the aesthetics of maternity Susan Goodwin and Kate Huppatz
• 5. Good mothers go school shopping Claire Aitchison
• 6. The good mother and the high school: a view from the 20th century Helen Proctor
• 7. Mothers and mutual obligation: policy reforming the good mother Megan Blaxland
• 8. Misrepresenting Indigenous mothers: maternity allowances in the media Leanne Cutcher and Talila Milroy
• 9. Aboriginal mother yarns Jane Moore and Lynette Riley
• 10. Mother impossible: the experiences of lesbian parents Margot Rawsthorne
• 11. Being a real mother: adoptive mothers' experiences Denise Lynch Index.
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Exploring the Good Mother Hypothesis: Do Child Outcomes Vary with the Mother's Share of Income?

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Postnatal Depression: The Role of “Good Mother” Ideals and Maternal Shame in a Community Sample of Mothers in Australia

• Original Article
• Published: 16 October 2021
• Volume 85 , pages 661–676, ( 2021 )

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• Cherie Sonnenburg 1 &
• Yvette D. Miller   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5393-7142 2  

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Contemporary literature confirms that “good mother” ideology dominates cultural discourses of motherhood in Australia, USA, United Kingdom, and Korea. Within this context, maternal shame refers to a domain-specific shame arising from negative evaluation of the maternal self-concept against socio-culturally derived ideals of motherhood. This study investigated whether incongruence between mothers’ maternal self-concept and “good mother” ideologies was associated with postnatal depression (PND) symptom severity in women up to 12 months postpartum, and whether these associations were explained by maternal shame. We hypothesised that a larger discrepancy between women’s maternal self-concept and both their own and sociocultural good mother ideals would be associated with more severe PND symptomology, and that these associations would be mediated by maternal shame. In this cross-sectional study, a community sample of 230 birth mothers with an infant aged 2 weeks to 12 months completed an online survey comprising established measures for the hypothesised variables, plus demographic, depression history, and partner support details. Mothers who experienced greater incongruence between their maternal self-concept and “good mother” ideals experienced more severe PND symptomology after controlling for partner support and previous depression. Maternal shame mediated these relationships. Findings suggest that good mother ideology may be implicated in mothers’ postnatal mental health.

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Common negative thoughts in early motherhood and their relationship to guilt, shame and depression, changes in mothering ideology after childbirth and maternal mental health in french women, explore related subjects.

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Cherie Sonnenburg

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Informed consent was obtained from all participants in this study. The research reported in this manuscript received ethical review and approval from the Queensland University of Technology Human Research Ethics Committee, #1800001246, 12th March 2019: "Postnatal depression: The role of sociocultural ideals of motherhood, maternal shame, and belongingness".

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Yvette Miller has previously completed paid consultancy work for a not-for-profit organisation to evaluate a peer-led support strategy for women with postpartum depression. Those clients had no involvement in the research described in this manuscript. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare.

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Sonnenburg, C., Miller, Y.D. Postnatal Depression: The Role of “Good Mother” Ideals and Maternal Shame in a Community Sample of Mothers in Australia. Sex Roles 85 , 661–676 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01239-0

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Accepted : 19 July 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01239-0

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The "Good Mother": Does She Exist?

Moving beyond the idealization of the all-giving and intuitive nurturer..

Posted April 30, 2021 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• What Is Projection?
• Find a therapist near me
• Some believe that the good mother reflects an archetype of motherhood contextualized to sociocultural expectations and practices.
• How a mother behaves toward her children may be a reflection of how she was mothered.
• The desire to be unconditionally loved is an exceptionally strong emotion, and most mothers, in their own way, demonstrate this.
• Psychologically, a good mother loves all her children while recognizing the need to mother them according to who they are and their needs.

Who is a good mother?

Goodwin and Huppatz (2010), in their study of contemporary motherhood in Australia, observe that the image of “the good mother” is powerful, though a much more nuanced concept than it would first appear. The authors observed that the "good mother" reflects the ideals of motherhood that stem from cultural beliefs, social arrangements, and social practices, such as a focus on a nuclear family or extended kinship groups. It is contextualized to sociocultural expectations and practices. Goodwin and Huppatz note that the ideal of the good mother may “operate beyond the belief systems or choices of individual women” (p.2).

In contemporary society, the ideal of the good mother is a changing concept, diverse and in flux. The good mother can take many different forms: the good working mother, the good stay-at-home mother, the good single mother, the good mother who is a stepmother, grandmother, aunt, etc. The good mother may shift with political ideology; for example, for some societies, feminist ideologies specifically have shifted the paradigm away from the expectation that most women have as a biological imperative or drive to be mothers, whereas, in other societies or cultural subgroups, this may not be the case.

Goodwin and Huppatz observe that the good mother may be a concept that is vulnerable to projection and stereotyping. They suggest the good mother is “a formidable social construct placing pressure on women to conform to particular standards and ideals, against which they are judged and judge themselves” (p.1-2). At the idealized pole, the good mother always acts responsibly, is an intuitive nurturer, and places her children above all else—as she is, at her core, devoted to family.

The good mother may be equated with saintliness. The mother archetype is the selfless nurturer. However, a more realistic assessment is that a good mother is not a perfect mother, just as no human being is a perfect person.

A mother may behave the same or differently toward each of her children. This, too, can be a function of her dynamics alone or the dynamics of the relationship between the mother and the child. A child’s (adult children included) belief that “Mother loved me more” is not always exaggerated or false. Mothers, like everyone else, may have biases toward family members.

Do children (young or adult) have equal love for each parent and express their feelings the same way to both? Probably not. Each one of us is a unique person, and thus interactions with certain people cannot always be the same as those with others. Psychologically speaking, a good mother loves all her children but interacts with them according to who they are and their needs.

Mothers may express their concern and love based on how they were mothered. For example, mothers whose own mothers were anxious or fearful of what could happen to their child may, in turn, become overprotective of their children. A mother who lost her own mother at a young age may want to be very involved in her child’s life to create as many memories as possible. A mother whose own mother expressed love through food may do so with her own children.

Mothering styles may not change, even as the child grows into adulthood. In some cases, a person may idealize their mother not because she is a saint, but because of a dysfunctional situation (e.g., child’s fear of being abandoned or inability to recognize her weaknesses and faults). In these cases, the love the individual has for their mother may be due to conscious or unconscious factors.

Why Mothers Matter So Much

Despite the archetypes of the all-giving and intuitive nurturer that may be embedded in our psyches, no mother is a perfect mother; yet, for many, the imperfect human that is mother is beloved. Of all the people in the world, who loves us the most? The majority of people will name their mother. Why? Maybe because of the visceral connectivity and oneness while in the womb. Maybe because she was the first who kissed, fed, spoke kind words, and lovingly caressed us. There could be many explanations. However, the desire to be unconditionally loved is an exceptionally strong emotion , and most mothers, in their own way, demonstrate this.

It is not uncommon for people across all ages to “want” their mother in times of need. This is most poignantly observed when one is critically ill or crying out from pain and calls for their mother, even though she may not be alive. The reassurance we obtain from our mother’s presence, words, and touch often gives us the confidence , stamina, and desire to meet life’s most challenging events.

Our mothers (and ourselves as mothers) most certainly never actualized the idealized archetype of the perfect nurturer. Her love may not always have been unconditional; she is, after all, as imperfect in her humanity as are we. But our mothers have loved us, and we have loved our mothers. She is a good mother, even with myriad expressions of imperfect nurturing.

Goodwin, S. & Huppatz, K. (2010). The good mother: Contemporary motherhoods in Australia. Sydney University Press.

Shoba Sreenivasan, Ph.D., and Linda E. Weinberger, Ph.D. , are psychology professors at the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

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Mary Adams 1 * , Angelica Almonte 1

AM J QUALITATIVE RES, Volume 6, Issue 2, pp. 195-206

https://doi.org/10.29333/ajqr/12218

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The aim of this study was to explore the ways new mothers define a ‘"good"’ mother, in order to understand where discrepancies may arise. Researchers used data gathered from a larger quantitative study. Qualitative data was collected as an exploratory aim. Data was analyzed using the manifest and latent analysis technique. Data was collected as part of a larger study and secondary analysis was completed. The sample consisted of 72 first-time mothers who responded to the question: “How would you describe a ‘"good"’ mother” at an antepartum and postpartum visit. Two themes arose from the data: Structure Lives to Always put Baby First and Open to Help. Many first-time mothers defined a ‘"good"’ mother using rigid, absolute terms such as ‘always’ and ‘no matter what’ prior to delivery. The postpartum definitions included slightly more forgiving language as they added that new mothers needed patience, and learning with the baby. First time mothers used rigid, absolute terms to define a ‘"good"’ mother. This study addressed the discrepancy between expectations and reality in the first-time mother population. Discrepancies have been shown to lead to postpartum depression. Nurses who care for new mothers can use this information to address expectations and how this will affect the mothers if reality does not match expectations.

Keywords: Definitions of motherhood, Expectations of motherhood, "Good" mother, Motherhood, Nursing.

• Adams, M. (2015). Motherhood: A Discrepancy theory. Research and Theory for Nursing Practice,29 (2), 143-157. https://doi.org/10.1891/1541-6577.29.2.143
• Adams, M., Byrn, M., Penckofer, S., Bryant, F., & Almonte, A. (2021). Expectations of motherhood and quality of life. The American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing 46 (1), 70-75. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMC.0000000000000690
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• Haga, S. M., Lynne, A., Slinning, K., & Kraft, P. (2012). A qualitative study of depressive symptoms and well-being among first-time mothers. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences , 26 (3), 458–46https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6712.2011.00950.x
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• Henshaw, E. J., Fried, R., Teeters, J. B., & Siskind, E. E. (2014). Maternal expectations and postpartum emotional adjustment in first-time mothers: Results of a questionnaire survey. Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, 35 , 69–75. https://doi.org/10.3109/0167482X.2014.937802
• Kauppi, C., Montgomery, P., Shaikh, A., & White, T. (2012). Postnatal depression: When reality does not match expectations. In Rojas Castillo, M. G. (Ed.), Perinatal depression (pp. 55–80). InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/1282
• Kleinheksel, A.J., Rockich-Winston, N., Tawfik, H., & Wyatt, T. R. (2020). Qualitative research in pharmacy education: Demystifying content analysis. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education,84 (1), Article 7113. https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe7113
• Law, N. K., Hall, P. L., & Cheshire, A. (2021). Common negative thoughts in early motherhood and their relationship to guilt, shame and depression. Journal of Child & Family Studies , 30 (8), 1831–1845. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-01968-6
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The myth of the good mother

I could not fathom failing at the most basic measure of good motherhood. But some things cannot be fixed.

My idea of the good mother began long before I became a mother. The good mother was implied in the toys I played with, the TV shows I watched in the 1970s and 1980s, and the cultural cues I got from religion, family and community.

The good mother was kind, patient and endlessly compassionate. The good mother was happy too and, perhaps more importantly, her children were happy.

The good mother baked. She listened. She sacrificed. There was not much more to the good mother’s identity than motherhood itself and motherhood was enough.

I internalised the myth of the good mother throughout my early life, even when my understanding of myself had nothing to do with motherhood and my identity was still nebulous and ill-defined.

I did not count the days until I became a mother, did not picture my life being completed by a child, and did not define my personhood in the context of motherhood.

Then, at the age of 29, I suddenly wanted a baby. About a year after this desire manifested, I had my first daughter.

Impossible tasks

My younger daughter turned 16 in April. She is not happy. Her days, restricted by the pandemic and further restricted by her too-young-to-drive status, are filled with screens and anxiety.

Her junior year of high school will be entirely virtual. Her interactions with friends are mostly limited to Snapchat. She is an only child, not by birth, but because her sister died from cancer three years ago.

It has taken me 19 years to understand that it is not my job to make my children happy.

It has taken me 19 years to realise that orchestrating someone else’s happiness is, in fact, an impossible task.

My older daughter died before she could benefit from this wisdom, but maybe it is not too late for Emily.

You would think I would have learned my lesson back in 2012 when Ana was diagnosed with cancer. But back then I still thought she would beat it. I could not fathom failing at the most basic measure of good motherhood  – a measure so obvious that I did not even bother to list it with all the other traits, above.

Good mothers do not lose their children.

Yet, I have not failed at being a good mother because my older daughter died.

I have not failed at being a good mother because my younger daughter is not happy.

I have failed because I have been attached to the misguided assumption that I could somehow control my daughter’s happiness. I failed because I did not understand that my need for her to be happy was causing her to suppress her other feelings. I failed because I linked her happiness inextricably to my happiness. I had given her her own impossible task –  make sure mom is not sad.

I was so busy trying to play the role of the good mother, that I did not realise I was perpetuating another myth –  that of the good daughter.

A stranger from a faded dream

Motherhood clarified my identity in ways I did not expect. I have recently realised this thanks to my new therapist who asked me an innocuous question.

“What were you like as a child?”

“Quiet. Shy. Creative. I stayed out of trouble,” I had replied. It was a boring question and one I had no interest in elaborating on. “I don’t have clear memories from my childhood or teenage years. It’s like trying to recall a dream.”

She had remained silent for several seconds, before trying again. “OK, tell me what you were like in your twenties.”

What does it matter? I had thought, but said, “I went to college, never graduated, got a job in an office. I met my husband and got married. I wanted to be a novelist, but I got sidetracked.” I felt a familiar faint pang at this admission. It was the feeling of regret, so dulled by time that I might not have even noticed it if I had not been looking.

She wanted more. She wanted me to describe what I was really like. What drove my decisions? What were my needs, interests and hopes? Who did I confide in? Where had I hoped to go in life?

“Who were you?” she had asked.

The same voice in my head kept answering, What does it matter?

“That person doesn’t feel real,” I had finally admitted to her. “Nothing was real until I had Ana. Then I became who I am now, Ana’s mother. Emily’s mother. But Ana’s gone and Emily is nearly grown,” I had said, starting to cry. “I feel myself unravelling. I am becoming someone nondescript and half-formed, just like the years before I was a mother.”

“We need to resurrect some of the person you were before you had children,” my new therapist said gently.

But I do not know that person. I do not care about her. She is a stranger from a faded dream.

‘Please, please, please be happy’

My daughter is a painter. She is a musician. She loves film and books and our grumpy, irrepressible cat.

She watches hours of TikTok videos and laughs with her whole body.

She thrives on complexity, on questions of existence and the science of relationships. She wants to understand the motivation behind why people argue. She is not afraid to explore the things that interest her. She is learning how to play the drums and the guitar and to sing like her favourite artists – Thom Yorke, James Maynard Keenan, Annie Clark, Ella Fitzgerald, Bjork.

She is watching TED talks about quantum theory. She is painting and drawing, turning canvas into colour and light.

Sometimes she curls up inside her own despair and nothing I do or say can reach her.

“Am I a horrible person?” she asks and the tears come.

“No, of course not,” I reply. She does not want more than this. She wants me to hear her. She wants me to witness her not being happy and know that I still love her. If I go in any other direction, she moves further away from me.

I must not show her how this breaks my heart because the good mother has unfairly made my heart her responsibility.

I must not say, “Don’t cry. Don’t be sad. Please, please, please be happy.” I must not say these things even though deep within my psyche the good mother wails and shrieks, “Fix this!”

The things that cannot be fixed

Some things cannot be fixed. The good mother will never understand that. She could not fix the cancer that killed Ana.

She cannot undo the trauma and heartache that makes Emily recoil at the idea of always being happy.

I cannot live up to the myth of the good mother. It is time to let her go, even though it means unravelling a huge part of myself. She is a fictional idea of motherhood. I realise that now. The good mother tethered my happiness to my children’s happiness. That was hurting them.

They thought their sadness, anger, fear and distress made them bad. They tried to keep me happy by suppressing these emotions. It got harder to do this when Ana got sick. It became impossible for Emily to do this after Ana died, though she managed, at least for a while.

My new therapist is not precisely wrong about resurrecting some of who I was before I became a mother. Recalling that person feels important, if only to remind myself that motherhood is not the only thing worthwhile about myself.

I am learning how to listen to Emily without trying to fix what is wrong. I am trying to let her see that I love her, even when she is sad or mad or anxious.

I am also trying not to suppress my own emotions, and to remind my daughter (and myself) that we can be unhappy one minute, then feel joy the next.

I am learning again, pursuing random things that interest me the way I did in my twenties and early thirties, and trying not to expect too much from myself.

The good mother’s voice is not as loud and insistent as it once was. I am not burying her or saying goodbye. I am simply letting the idea of her fade, disconnecting it from the reality of motherhood, in all its imperfection, pain, and beauty, so that I can, at last, be free.

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Evaluating Grandmother Effects

Kristen hawkes.

Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 South 1400 East, Stewart 102, Salt Lake City UT 84112; USA, Ph: 801-581-6117, ude.hatu.orhtna@sekwah

Ken R. Smith

Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, 225 South 1400 East, Emery 228, and, Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, 2000 Circle of Hope, Salt Lake City UT 84112; USA

Women who have outlived child-bearing have long been described as post-reproductive. But contributions they make to the survival or fertility of their descendants enhance the reproduction of their genes. Consequently natural selection affects this characteristic stage of human life history. Grandmother effects can be measured in data sets that include births and deaths over several generations, but unmeasured covariates complicate the task. Here we focus on two complications: cohort shifts in mortality and fertility, and maternal age at death. We use the Utah Population Database to show that longevity of grandmothers may be associated with fewer grandchildren, as reported by Madrigal and Melendez-Obando (2008) for a Costa Rican sample, even when grandmother effects are actually positive.

A grandmother hypothesis to explain the evolution of human life history proposes that distinctive human longevity evolved when ancestral females whose fertility was declining increased their fitness by provisioning grandchildren ( Hawkes et al., 1998 ; O’Connell et al., 1999 ; Alvarez, 2000 ; Hawkes, 2003 ). That hypothesis was prompted in part by ethnographic observations of food gathering by Hadza hunter-gatherers and the weight changes of Hadza children ( Hawkes et al., 1997 ). Children’s weight changes correlated with their mothers’ foraging effort unless their mothers had a nursing infant. Then the older youngsters’ weight gains depended on their grandmothers’ foraging instead. The tradeoffs suggested an evolutionary scenario about adaptive shifts in an ancestral population facing ecological changes that reduced the availability of food young juveniles could handle for themselves. The scenario involves a shift from an ancestral life history like that of chimpanzees and the other living great apes to the greater longevity, later maturity, and shorter birth intervals that characterize humans ( Hawkes, 2003 , Hawkes et al., 2003 ; Hawkes and Blurton Jones, 2005 ; Hawkes, 2006 ; Robson et al., 2006 ). The Hadza example suggests that grandmother effects may persist in modern populations, and many – though not all - analyses of ethnographic and historical data sets have found them ( Sear and Mace, 2008 for review).

Ethnographic observations, like those of Hadza foragers, have the advantage of tracking the activities and conditions of individuals. But they have the disadvantage of small sample size and short time scales. Historical data sets, by contrast, rarely include direct information on individual time allocation and economic productivity, or individual growth, morbidity, and mortality correlates. But they have the substantial advantages of large sample size and time frames that encompass realized fertility and mortality. ( Lahdenper ä et al., 2004 ; Voland et al., 2005 ; Sear and Mace, 2008 ).

Recently Madrigal and Melendez-Obando (2008) used a historical Costa Rican data set to evaluate a version of the grandmother hypothesis. They concluded that instead of increased fitness for their descendants, “the maternal grandmother is exerting a negative influence” (208:228). This they interpreted as “strong grounds for questioning the universality of the grandmother hypothesis” (2008:223).

Madrigal and Melendez-Obando consider both a grandmother hypothesis and a mother hypothesis to explain why women usually outlive their fertility. The mother hypothesis proposes a fitness advantage for ending child-bearing early so that maternal effort can be invested in previously born children ( Williams, 1957 ). Like the grandmother hypothesis, this assumes that survival past fertility is not necessarily post-reproductive. In this case the fitness benefit comes from investments that improve the survival of offspring. Madrigal and Melendez-Obando explicitly recognize this to be the predicted benefit to mothers for stopping early. Nevertheless, for both hypotheses their “proxy for fitness is the number of children produced by a woman, not the number who survived…” (p. 224), since they are “simply not in a position to test [effects on offspring survival], and must work with the” data at hand (p 228). They find that a woman’s longevity is positively correlated with her own fertility, but negatively correlated with the fertility of her daughter. They conclude that “the relatively large number of studies on the grandmother hypothesis have overshadowed a simpler explanation for the evolution of postmenopausal longevity: postcycling females achieve higher fertility by supporting their own offspring, not their grandchildren“ (p 228).

Madrigal and Melendez-Obando would not, as they note, be the first to find mothers having no positive effects on their daughters’ fertility. Mothers may even protect their daughters from higher fertility that could impose costs on the welfare of the daughter and her other children ( Leonetti et al., 2007 , Sear and Mace, 2008 ). Such tradeoffs between offspring numbers and their survival are a central assumption of the mother hypothesis, as recognized by Madrigal and Melendez-Obando. Those tradeoffs imply negative, not positive effects on fertility (e.g., Blurton Jones, 1986 ; Borgerhoff Mulder, 2001 ; Strassman and Gillespie, 2002 ). That makes positive correlations between a woman’s longevity and her fertility – here called mother effects – initially surprising, and more so combined with negative grandmother effects. The combination prompted us to consider whether the findings might be less a reflection of what Costa Rican mothers and grandmothers were doing than a consequence of the demographic transition in this data set and the death ages of the women sampled.

The Costa Rican “data consist of maternal genealogies started from 152 living subjects… Most genealogies are at least seven generations long…Considering all individuals across all generations and all lineages [there are] …1,172 individuals… Several families extend back to the 1500s” ( Madrigal and Melendez-Obando 2008 :224). That suggests an average of 7.7 individuals per lineage, but moving back through the generations the lineages intertwine. Since the same women occur in different lineages, Madrigal and Melendez-Obando measured mother effects by randomly selecting a woman from each lineage and correlating the longevity and the fertility of the selected set. They measured grandmother effects by correlating the longevity of each selected woman with the fertility of her linking daughter. Using bootstrap resampling techniques, they generated 2000 samples and reported the 90% confidence intervals from the 2000 correlations. Correlations for a woman’s longevity on her own fertility have a 90% confidence interval of +0.015 to +0.236 around a mean r of +0.1258. Correlations for the grandmother effects have a 90% confidence interval of −0.2 to +0.007 around a mean r of −0.106. As they note these confidence intervals do not overlap.

The Costa Rican data are not fully described, but they clearly extend over four centuries. That time period witnessed a demographic transition from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality ( Kirk, 1996 ). Pre-transition longevities would consequently be shorter and fertilities higher, while post-transition lifespans would be longer and fertilities lower. With lineages pooled over this transition, and a woman drawn at random from each pool, a negative relationship between women’s longevity and their daughters’ fertility might well be common. However, the same thing should be true of the relationship between a woman’s longevity and her own fertility. Pre-transition women have shorter lifespans and higher fertilities, post-transition women live longer and bear fewer children. But Madrigal and Melendez-Obando report a positive correlation between a woman’s longevity and her own fertility. One possible source for this contradiction could be the death ages of the women sampled. If women are included when their fertile span was cut short by death during their childbearing years, the very short lifespans and low parities of those women would make correlations between age at death and fertility especially strong - perhaps strong enough to override the demographic transition effects. We hypothesize that 1) negative grandmother effects could be artifacts of pooling over a demographic transition with 2) mother effects strong enough to overwhelm this pooling when samples include women whose fertility was curtailed by their own early death.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Since the Cost Rican data set is not published, we turned to the Utah Population Data Base (UPDB, Bean et al., 1990 ) to test these hypotheses. If we found these patterns in the Utah data that also encompass the demographic transition, the plausibility that they characterize the Costa Rican data would be strengthened. For mother effects, correlations between women’s longevity and their own fertility, we used the 101,607 parous women born in 1900 or before with complete information on longevity and fertility. For grandmother effects we used the 51,012 women born before 1870 on whom there are complete fertility data for a randomly selected daughter. This design assumes an average 30 year generation time, with the births of the children and grandchildren distributed across the same years. The large samples make unnecessary the bootstrapping used by Madrigal and Melendez-Obando who were working with very small lineages. Otherwise we calculate correlation coefficients just as they did.

Figure 1 displays the average death age and average parity for Utah women who were born in the 1800s and lived at least to the age of 50 according to their birth year. The demographic transition began with women born in the middle of this century. Average death age for those who lived at least to 50 started to increase from about 75 years in those born in mid- 1800s to pass 80 for those born at the turn of the century. At the same time, average parities of those women decreased from about eight births to less than four.

Average age at death and average parity for women in the Utah Population Database by birth year across the nineteenth century. Only women who lived at least to 50 years are included.

Table 1 reports the correlation between age at death and parity for the mother sample and age at death and a daughter’s fertility for the grandmothers. Results are given with all women pooled and then with birth year controlled to partial out demographic transition effects. We also distinguish between all parous women and those who survived past 50. The latter restriction excludes women whose early deaths curtailed their fertility and sharply limited any grandmothering.

Correlation coefficients between age at death and own fertility (mothers) and between age at death and a daughter’s fertility (grandmothers) for women in the Utah Population Database who were born in the nineteenth century. The mother sample includes all parous women born before 1900. Column 2 lists sample sizes. Column 3 lists correlations for samples pooled across the demographic transition ( Figure 1 ), with significance levels in column 4. In column 5, the effect of pooling across the demographic transition is removed by controlling the woman’s birth year. Without this control, the shorter lifespans of the higher fertility pre-transition women combined with the longer lifespans of the lower fertility post-transition women have a negative effect on correlations between longevity and fertility. Line 2 removes women who died during the child-bearing years. Their inclusion has a strong effect on associations between death age and fertility because their early deaths impose low parities. The grandmother sample includes all women born before 1870 with complete information about the fertility of a randomly chosen daughter. We use the fertility of a daughter to parallel the Madrigal and Melendez-Obando (2008) measure of grandmother effects as the correlation between a woman’s longevity and the fertility of her linking daughter. Line four removes women who died before reaching their grandmothering years.

The first row shows that for the mother sample, there is a postive relationship between age at death and number of children (column 3) as reported by Madrigal and Melendez-Obando for Costa Rica. Continuing across the row, the association is even stronger (column 5) when the demographic transition effects are removed by controlling birth year. That control in column 5 takes account of the cohort differences between lower average lifespan, high average fertility, pre-transition women and longer average lifespan, low fertility post transition women. Line two removes the women whose fertility was interrupted by death during their fertile years. Considering only those who actually outlived their fertility, the association between parity and death age changes sign. Row two, column 3 pools these women across the demographic transition, giving a correlation coefficient that is strongly negative. Removing the demographic transition effects (column 5) leaves a correlation that is still negative but less so because the systematic cohort variation is now removed. Comparison between columns 3 and 5 indicates the strength of the effect of pooling across the demographic transition. Comparison between rows 1 and 2 indicates the large contribution that early adult mortality makes to correlations between longevity and fertility for the mother sample.

The third row (column 3) shows that when grandmother data are pooled across the demographic transition, the correlation between a woman’s longevity and the fertility of a randomly selected daughter is negative. Just as Madrigal and Melendez-Obando reported for their Costa Rican data set, grandmothers’ longevity appears to have a negative effect on the number of grandchildren they leave. But the pooling combines high mortality, high fertility conditions with low mortality low fertility conditions. When this systematic secular variation is removed by controlling grandmother’s birth year (column 5) the negative relationship disappears. Row four shows that for the women who actually reached their grandmothering years, the correlation is still negative, as long as the demographic transition is ignored (column 3). As above, the negative grandmother effect disappears when we control for the systematic variation in longevity and fertility across cohorts that span the demographic transition (column 5).

We found correlations in the UPDB like the ones Madrigal and Melendez-Obando report for their historical Costs Rican data set. In the pooled UPDB, women with longer lifespans had daughters with lower fertility, an apparently negative effect of grandmothers’ survival on their number of grandchildren. But this negative relationship resulted from pooling pre-transition lower survival, higher fertility women with post-transition higher survival, lower fertility women. When this secular variation is controlled the negative relationship disappears.

The same pooling across the demographic transition that results in this apparently negative grandmother effect should also affect associations between a woman’s longevity and her own fertility. It does. But those associations can still be positive if women whose fertility was curtailed by death during the childbearing years are included. Those necessarily low parities and young ages at death weight the correlation enough to override the counter effects of pooling pre- and post-transition women. The correlation changes from positive to negative when the mothers who died young are removed. If only women who outlived their fertility are included, then, like the grandmothers the relationship is negative. And like the grandmothers, controlling for birth year to remove the negative effect of pooling across the demographic transition moves both the full and the restricted sample in a positive direction.

Our analyses indicate that measuring grandmother effects in the Utah population requires attention to covariates (see Smith et al., submitted). The same is likely true for the Costa Rican case. Patterns there may be different of course. Madrigal and Melendez-Obando report very well-behaved results from bootstrapping samples of women drawn from sparse lineages extending over major demographic shifts. But the UPDB analyses demonstrate that similar results can be analytical artifacts. We found that 1) negative grandmother effects can result from pooling pre- and post-demographic transition conditions, while 2) associations between a woman’s longevity and her own fertility overwhelm the negative effects of this pooling when women who died during their childbearing years are included. Maybe, as Madrigal and Melendez-Obando conclude, a Costa Rican woman’s “postreproductive longevity is…detrimental to her inclusive fitness” (2008:229). But maybe not. To falsify our hypotheses that their findings arise from the same confounds that allow us to reproduce similar associations in the Utah data, we need to know more about the Costa Rican data set itself and more about the details of their analyses.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was supported in part by the National Institute of Aging by grant AG022095 (The Utah Study of Fertility, Longevity, and Aging). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Aging or the National Institutes of Health. We thank the Pedigree and Population Resource (funded by the Huntsman Cancer Foundation) for its role in the ongoing collection, maintenance and support of the Utah Population Database (UPDB). We also acknowledge Dr. Geraldine P. Mineau and Alison Fraser, MSPH, for their careful management of and assistance with the data used for this study.

Contributor Information

Kristen Hawkes, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 South 1400 East, Stewart 102, Salt Lake City UT 84112; USA, Ph: 801-581-6117, ude.hatu.orhtna@sekwah .

Ken R. Smith, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, University of Utah, 225 South 1400 East, Emery 228, and, Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, 2000 Circle of Hope, Salt Lake City UT 84112; USA.

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Living Near Your Grandmother Has Evolutionary Benefits

Jonathan Lambert

Killer whales, Japanese aphids and Homo sapiens — they're among the few organisms whose females live on long past the age of reproduction.

Since the name of the evolutionary game is survival and reproduction, the phenomenon begs explanation — why live longer than you can reproduce? In the 1960s, researchers came up with the "grandmother hypothesis" to explain the human side of things. The hypothesis is that the help of grandmothers enables mothers to have more children. So women who had the genetic makeup for longer living would ultimately have more grandchildren carrying their longevity genes. (Sorry, grandfathers, you're not included in this picture.)

Why Grandmothers May Hold The Key To Human Evolution

Two studies published Thursday in Current Biology take another look at this hypothesis and add new insights into the role grandmothers play.

The first hard evidence for the grandmother hypothesis was gathered by Kristen Hawkes , an anthropologist at the University of Utah who was studying the Hadza people, a group of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania. Hawkes was struck by "how productive these old ladies were" at foraging for food, and she later documented how their help allowed mothers to have more children.

If our long post-reproductive lives evolved because of grandmothers, we should be able to find fingerprints of the benefits of grandmothering in many cultures. But the circumstances of modern life differ drastically from those we faced at the beginning of our evolutionary story.

The studies in Current Biology turned to the detailed records of two preindustrial populations, one in what is now Quebec and the other in Finland. The researchers mined these rich databases to quantify the reproductive boost that grandmothers provide and to help us better understand the limits of their help.

In 1608, French Catholic priests in what is present-day Quebec began recording every birth, death and marriage in their parish. As settlers continued to arrive, multiply and fill the St. Lawrence Valley, parish records ballooned. "We had the data set of the first French settlers coming off the first boat," says Patrick Bergeron , an evolutionary biologist at Bishop's University, who co-authored the study.

The population was mostly French and mostly farmers and was fairly mobile. That homogeneity helped the researchers isolate the effect of grandmothers and see if it mattered how close, geographically, a daughter was to her mother.

Hawkes explains that this approach adds nuance to previous studies of the grandmother hypothesis, which didn't directly measure proximity. "After all, if you're in Quebec but your grandma's in Cleveland, she may not be much help," she says.

Sacha Engelhardt , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern who conducted research for this study at Université de Sherbrooke, looked for groups of sisters in which some left home and others stayed put. If being close to grandma helps, the homebodies should have had more kids than their adventurous sisters.

It turned out that staying close to grandma paid off in family size. Women who lived 200 miles from mom had, on average, 1.75 fewer children than their sisters who lived in the same parish as their mother. "Women in those days had a lot of kids, on average almost eight," says Engelhardt. But times were tough, and about half of a woman's offspring died before age 15. Such harsh conditions led to a range of reproductive success; the number of grandkids per grandmother in this database ranged from one to 195.

Being geographically close to grandma curbed child mortality too and allowed mothers to start having kids at a younger age.

Altogether, these results are what you'd expect if the grandmother hypothesis is true. "These results are really interesting," says Hawkes. "They took a much more fine-grained approach, and it gives us a clearer picture of the effect of grandmothers."

But if grandmas are so beneficial, why don't they live even longer — long enough to help their great-grandchildren grow up and have kids of their own?

To answer that question, you need to consider not only how much help a grandmother can give but also how the opportunity for a grandmother to help changes over time. If a grandmother's abilities deteriorate with age or if there just aren't as many grandkids around to help, the evolutionary benefits of living longer might disappear.

The second study, conducted by Simon Chapman, a Ph.D. student at the University of Turku in Finland, looked at a database of preindustrial Finns to answer this question. From 1731 to 1895, all births, deaths and marriages were recorded by the state. Finns moved around much less than the French settlers of the previous study, so most grandchildren lived close to their grandparents.

In Finland too, the presence of a grandmother boosted a daughter's total number of offspring. But closer inspection revealed some caveats.

The study shows that the opportunity for grandmas to help was not constant over the years. On average, a woman became a grandmother in her 40s, and the number of grandkids she cared for steadily rose, peaking in her early 60s and then diminishing into her mid-70s.

Having a grandmother age 50 to 75 increased a toddler's chance of surviving from age 2 to 5 by 30 percent. But the researchers found that the benefits of having a grandmother petered out after she passed age 75. In fact, the presence of an older paternal grandmother reduced a newborn's probability of surviving to age 2 by 37 percent.

Why? Too many mouths to feed, according to Chapman. "At this time, paternal grandmothers often lived in the same home as their son and may have required extra care," he says. That may have shifted resources away from younger grandchildren.

Chapman says that together, these results help explain why selection has extended human lives past our reproductive prime, but only up to a point. Grandma can help when her grandchildren are growing up and she is likely in her 50s, 60s and early 70s. As both these studies demonstrate, grandmas can make a big difference in these years, and that reproductive boost helps push human life past the normal finish line of old age.

But as grandkids grow older, grandma's help doesn't have the same impact, and the evolutionary value of living much longer decreases. Chapman found that grandmothers' mortality rates shoot up just when this dip in opportunity for helping arrives.

Rosalyn LaPier is intrigued by the results of these new studies. She examines the benefits of grandmothers on a societal and cultural level. Currently a professor at the University of Montana who studies how indigenous cultures transmit knowledge, LaPier grew up on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana and spent countless afternoons with her grandmother learning about the land and plants that sustain their culture.

For most of human history, this kind of knowledge was transmitted orally. "In North American indigenous communities, you see the transmission of agricultural knowledge across generations," she says. "In many cases from grandmother to grandchild."

How did your grandmother help your family survive and thrive? And is there a piece of valuable advice she's handed down to you? Share your stories on Twitter. Pictures of you and grandma are welcome!

Jonathan Lambert is an intern on NPR's Science Desk. You can follow him on Twitter: @evolambert

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Cardi B Updates Fans on 'Little Baby' No. 3 and Says She 'Feels Good' Alongside New-Mom Selfie: 'I'm So in Love'

The rapper announced on Sept. 12 that she and estranged husband Offset welcomed their third baby together

Cardi B is giving fans an update on how she feels as a newly-minted mom of three.

On Friday, Sept. 13, one day after announcing she welcomed her third baby with estranged husband Offset , 32, the "I Like It" rapper, 31, took to her broadcast channel to share her love for her new baby girl and thank her fans for all their support.

"Thank you everyone that has shown me so much love," the proud mom shared, adding, "I'm sooo in love with my little baby!! She so cute and tiny."

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The singer also gave an update on how she's feeling post-birth, having nothing but positive words to share.

"I feel good!" she said. "Very rejuvenated very empowered, very MOTHA."

"But yes thank you so much for all the beautiful things y'all say it feels really good," she continued. "Bardigang here's a lil pic to get yall mad! Don't judge!! See yall soon."

Cardi included a screenshot of herself on a FaceTime call, posing for the camera and making a kissing face.

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The rapper, who's already a mom to son Wave, 3, and daughter Kulture, 6, with Offset, welcomed her third baby on Saturday, Sept. 7. She shared the exciting news with an  Instagram  carousel posted on Thursday, Sept. 12.

In the first snap, the mom of three could be seen smiling with her baby in her arms in a hospital bed while wearing a colorful robe. In more photos and videos, Cardi's estranged husband Offset, from whom she  filed for divorce  in July, could be seen cradling the baby.

"The prettiest lil thing 🌸🌸 9/7/24 💖💖💖," Cardi wrote in her caption.

The proud parents could also be seen in the post sitting with both kids in the hospital room as they met their new baby sister. Kulture even held the little one in her arms, while Cardi lovingly gazed at her two girls.

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