ABSTRACT
Conceptual and practical issues associated with parenting in nonhuman primates and with maternal competence in chimpanzees, specifically, are addressed in this chapter. An important aspect of parenting, emphasized here, is that caregiving differs across ontogeny in primates. There are both short-term and long-term consequences of different parenting experiences, some of which differ across primate species. Although we might like to know universally what makes a good primate parent, the answer must be considered separately for different species. For some species, it seems evident that there are specific behaviors that must be learned to be a competent parent (for example for chimpanzees: Bard, 1994a, 1994b, 1995a, 2002), however, the need for learning parenting behaviors may not be true for all nonhuman primate species. In addition, the influence of early experience on maternal capability remains an unknown factor. These central questions of parenting in primates have been asked for close to 50 years and still have not been satisfactorily answered (Rogers and Davenport, 1970).
