Integrating childhood in the family context: Commentary on Bjorklund,Periss and Causey

Bjorklund, Periss and Causey use an evolutionary developmental perspective to highlight several reasons as to why children should be allowed to be children. Childhood is not just a training ground for adulthood, but there is a unique integrity to this phase of life. Bjorklund and colleagues suggest that several of the immature behaviours observed in children are adaptive in their own right providing children with immediate benefits for their particular age and do not necessarily (only) serve the function of providing benefits for the child later in development. The concept of ontogenetic adaptations is useful in providing a new lens on which to view infants, children, adolescents and even adults. In this commentary I focus on three issues related to their work: (1) the possibility that the overestimation tasks reviewed in their paper do not empirically verify that overestimation is related to perseverance in learning; (2) whether ontogenetic adaptations are gender specific; and (3) the costs of this extensive immaturity and how inappropriate overinvestment of parents may reflect a maladaptive response to low fertility in a resource-rich environment.