Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

434 J HOW THE MIND WORKSbenevolent interest in their welfare. They surely had genuine cause foralarm.In one study of emotionally healthy middle-class families in theUnited States, only half of the stepfathers and a quarter of the stepmothersclaimed to have "parental feeling" toward their stepchildren, andfewer still claimed to "love" them. The enormous pop-psychology literatureon reconstituted families is dominated by one theme: coping withantagonisms. Many professionals now advise warring families to give upthe ideal of duplicating a biological family. Daly and Wilson found thatstepparenthood is the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified.In the case of the worst abuse, homicide, a stepparent is forty to a hundredtimes more likely than a biological parent to kill a young child, evenwhen confounding factors—poverty, the mother's age, the traits of peoplewho tend to remarry—are taken into account.Stepparents are surely no more cruel than anyone else. Parenthood isunique among human relationships in its one-sidedness. Parents give;children take. For obvious evolutionary reasons, people are wired to wantto make these sacrifices for their own children but not for anyone else.Worse, as we shall see, children are wired to demand these sacrifices ofthe adults charged with their care, and that can make them downrightannoying to people other than their parents and close kin. The writerNancy Mitford said, "I love children, especially when they cry, for thensomeone takes them away." But if you are married to the children's parent,no one ever takes them away. The indifference, even antagonism, ofstepparents to stepchildren is simply the standard reaction of a human toanother human. It is the endless patience and generosity of a biologicalparent that is special. This point should not diminish our appreciation ofthe many benevolent stepparents; if anything, it should enhance it, forthey are especially kind and self-sacrificing people.It is often said that you are more likely to be killed by a relative in thehome than by a mugger in the street. That sounds suspicious to .anyonewho knows about evolutionary theory, and it turns out to be false.Homicide statistics are an important kind of evidence for theories ofhuman relationships. As Daly and Wilson explain, "Killing one's antago-