Fostering relations: first sex and marital timings for children raised by kin and non-kin carers

Kinship fostering is generally preferred to non-kin fostering by policy makers in the U.S. and elsewhere. Researchers and policy makers alike tend to provide several proximate reasons for why this may be, generally neglecting an ultimate evolutionary framework. However, kin selection theory predicts that in the absence of genetically related parents, care from kin will result in the most similar life history outcomes. In low-fertility settings, parents typically favour increased investment in embodied capital and thus delayed reproductive life history strategy. Using archival data from the original Kinsey survey, collected in the U.S. from 1938 to 1963, we used survival analyses to compare the effects of living with kin and non-kin fosterers in childhood on timings of first sex and marriage. Our results support a kin selection hypothesis showing that while fostered children have accelerated life histories compared to children from “intact families”, kin fosterers buffer children from early sexual and reproductive behaviors, compared to children cared for by non-kin.