Parent-Offspring Conflict

Parent-offspring conflict is an evolutionary concept where the interests of parents and their individual offspring differ slightly. Parents aim to distribute resources fairly among all their children to maximize their overall reproductive success, while each child is naturally motivated to secure as much resource and care as possible for itself. This can lead to behavioral conflicts, such as a child demanding more parental attention or resources than the parent is willing to give, since the child's strategy focuses on maximizing its own survival and growth, sometimes at the expense of its siblings' needs or the parent's overall reproductive goals.