Parental Investment in Children with Chronic Disease: The Effect of Child's and Mother's Age

Parents do not invest their resources in their children equally. Three factors which elicit differential parental investment are the parent's reproductive value, the child's reproductive value (RV), and the impact of the investment on the child (II). As the child matures, his RV increases while the II may decrease. This raises a question regarding the favored strategy of investment by child age. It was hypothesized that different categories of parental investment generate different age-based strategies. Emotional investment, such as maternal worrying for the child's health, was hypothesized to increase with the child's age, while direct care was hypothesized to decrease with the child's age. Both categories were hypothesized to increase with the mother's age at childbirth. 137 Israeli mothers of children with chronic neurological conditions reported levels of worrying for their child and levels of change in direct care. Maternal worrying about the child's health was positively associated with the child's ...