Sex with great grandmothers

Since the s, researchers have posited that one reason women tend to live decades past their reproductive years is that it increases the chances of their grandchildren surviving, through the physical support they often provide — the grandmother hypothesis. Rilling previously performed a similar exercise with fathers as they looked at pictures of their children. In contrast, when the grandmothers looked at images of their adult child, slightly different brain areas tended to be activated: those associated with cognitive empathy. This could indicate that they were trying to cognitively understand their adult child, rather than experiencing this more direct emotional connection. This could possibly help to explain the experience many grown-up children have of their parents often seeming more excited to see their grandchildren than them. The results support the idea that there may be a global caregiving system in the brain that is activated in mothers who have been examined in separate studies , fathers and grandmothers.

Brazil has a high rate of mothers living without a partner as well as a high intergenerational co-residence rate, including parents and grandparents. These family types may influence a child's well-being. Even though there is no evidence of sex-selective abortion in Brazil, sex preference could still be subtly present. This paper tests the composition of family structure father co-residence, grandmother co-residence, and birth of siblings in Brazil associated with the sex of the child by using a nationally representative household survey, treating sex of the first and second child as exogenous variables in OLS regressions. I found women with lower birth-order daughters are less likely to live with a partner. I also found suggestive evidence that maternal grandmothers are more likely to live with granddaughters than with grandsons.

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