Impairment in family caregiving: a biological perspective

This paper focuses on patterns in the care of children and dependent elders, providing a new perspective to understand impairment in family caregiving. One concept from evolutionary theory, kin selection, has promise for providing a broad framework for understanding patterns of family caregiving. We present an application of the evolutionary model to the issue of family care decisions in the face of potential conflicts of interest. Specifically, a mathematical biological model, which was developed to understand self-preservation motivation, is applied to the kin investment decision. Using the evolutionary model, the main predictors of investment would be relatedness, reproductive value, and expected benefit from the care invested. The biological model accounts very simply for decisions between caring for an elder parent or caring for your own child, and for decisions by two daughters (one with a child, one childless) to care for an elder parent. The factors that form the basis of an evolutionary model (relatedness, reproductive value, and benefit from care) have not been widely investigated in family care studies, however, and this absence reveals new directions for future research.