How Parents Meddle in Their Kids’ Love Lives
Taking a boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet your parents for the first time is a nerve-wracking experience. Will your new sweetheart meet your parents’ exacting standards? If they don’t, are your parents the sort to interfere in your love life? To push you away from your preferred partner towards the kind of match they think would suit you better?
Plenty of parents feel driven to meddle in their offspring’s romantic affairs, but why? Scientists think it’s because we have different priorities for our own mates and the mates of our offspring. There’s some overlap of course — an axe-wielding psychopath isn’t going to make it to the top of anyone’s list — but generally we prioritise good looks and an exciting personality in our own partners, and a good family background , ambitiousness, and social status in the partners of our children. The reason for this difference of opinion as to what constitutes a perfect partner is that we share more genes with our children that we do with our grandchildren.
OK, that might sound totally irrelevant, but bear with me for a moment. Imagine you meet someone. Imagine you decide to have kids with that person. Half of your genes and half of your partner’s genes go into those kids. The kids are 50% of you. But, because you are 50% of each of your own parents, your mum and dad will only make up 25% each of your kids. Grandparents have only half the stake in their grandchildren than those children’s parents do. This is why you should care more about the physical appearance of your partner than your parents should, given that physical appearance is highly heritable.
A good family background in your spouse is more important to your parents because the advantages that come along with a good family background won’t necessarily be genetically inherited, and they can more easily benefit the whole family. Say your prospective spouse is from a wealthy dynasty. That extra cash will bring benefits to you, but it could also make life better for your extended family. Although we all care about our extended family to some extent, our parents care about them much more than we do. Again, this is down to genetics. Grandparents make up 25% of the genetics of all of their grandchildren. We share 25% of our genes with our siblings’ children — out nieces and nephews — but twice as much, 50%, with our own children. So, of course, we will prioritise benefits to our own children over our nieces and nephews. This puts us into conflict with our parents, who would much prefer a more equitable share of resources among their descendents.
Although there are several researchers who have toyed with these ideas, only one has focussed all his time and attention on it. That’s Menelaos Apostelou of the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. In the past few years he’s published more research papers on parental manipulation of offspring mate choice than I’ve had hot dinners. That’s partly because I’m a fan of sushi: hot dinners aren’t really my thing. But seriously, if Apostelou’s parents ever kicked him out of the family home for pairing up with a subpar partner, he has so many papers he could build a house out of them.
Apostelou found that there are tonnes of tactics parents deploy in the hopes of influencing who their offspring shack up with. A couple of years ago he collected these tactics into 12 groups. We won’t go through each of them here (you can see the full list in this open access paper), but a couple of examples might give you an impression of the variety of tactics we’re talking about. Apostelou labels one group ‘matchmaker’ tactics, and this includes things parents do to amp up their offspring’s prospects in the mating market. Say, by giving them advice on how to appear attractive, or paying for gifts that make them more appealing to a prospective spouse, such as clothes, a car, or an expensive education. So-called ‘hardball’ tactics are likely to be less welcome, and include blackmailing a child into choosing the parent’s preferred partner, kicking offspring out of the house when they go against the parent’s wishes, or lying to offspring about their partner in an attempt to create a rift between them. All fun stuff, I am sure you agree.
The thing is, although Apostelou had this list of around 60 behaviours, he wasn’t sure which tactics were the most effective. Now, short of installing surveillance cameras in all our homes, it’s never going to be easy to observe parental manipulation in the real world. So Apostelou decided to ask a set of young adults which tactics they thought would be most effective in influencing their own mate choices. He also asked some older adults which tactics they thought would have the most effect on their kids.
Young adults thought that hardball tactics would be least effective. They conceded, however, that ‘advice and reasoning’ tactics did sometimes work. These include giving a child advice on their behaviour, asking them to take precautions, and prompting them to invite a partner home to meet mum and dad. I don’t know about you, but these don’t sound like very ‘tactical’ tactics to me. Surely that’s just what supportive parents do when they’re pretty confident that their children will make sensible decisions on their own. Do children really think these tactics are most effective, or, instead, do they simply think that parents who don’t interfere too much are less likely to see their meddling ways escalate into all out war?
Parents were broadly in agreement with younger adults as to the types of tactic that work best. However, Apostelou did find that parents weren’t able to assess whether a tactic would be more effective with a son or a daughter. Young adults were more likely to agree that ‘carrot and stick’ strategies would be effective if they were male than if they were female. In other words, men thought they would be more likely to bend to their parents’ will if their allowance was cut off, if they were disinherited, or if they were given money so that they didn’t have to rely on a partner. When parents were asked to rate the impact of these carrot and stick strategies, they thought they would have a bigger effect on their daughters than on their sons.
Still, it’s difficult to work out who, if anyone, is mistaken here. Are kids right to think that sons are more susceptible, or are parents correct that daughters fall in line faster, when the carrot and stick strategy is employed. Manipulating a child’s mate choice can often involve deception. After all, people are much more likely to respond to manipulation if they aren’t aware they’re being manipulated. Parents are probably more subtle in their efforts to control kids’ mate choice. So children aren’t likely to be able to spot every tactic in their parents’ arsenal.
Think about all the ways parents persuade their toddlers to eat their greens. Parents might claim that spinach will make their kids as muscly as Popeye. They might hold back the ice cream until their child eats one last mouthful of kale. Or they might mix vegetables in with more palatable foods. Each tactic could well be effective, but would the child be a good judge of how effective each one was? If they didn’t realise that their parents ever hid broccoli under the mashed potato, the parents might have happened upon an extremely effective broccoli delivery method. But the kid might think it was a ludicrous idea, destined to failure.
The point is, asking people to report on their own behaviour or on the behaviour of others is never going to be the best way to get at the truth. But it’s all we’ve got. Well, until we install a camera in every dining room in the land.
Apostelou, M., Kasapi, K., & Arakliti, A. (2015). Will they do as we wish? An investigation of the effectiveness of parental manipulation of mating behavior. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 1(1), 28–36. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 21 April 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
