ABSTRACT
Human infants need prolonged, intensive caregiving to survive and thrive. Human infants’ dependency is unlike many other newborn animals that are mobile shortly after birth, allowing them a much larger degree of independence from their parents. Early experiences have a lasting effect on our later cognitive and emotional development (Shonkoff, Boyce, and McEwen, 2009). Parenting our young represents one of our greatest social and practical challenges, helping to strengthen lifelong learning and facilitating our advanced cognitive flexibility (Bornstein et al., 2010; Konner, 2010). The pleasures of social interaction with infants are arguably some of our strongest motivators (Parsons, Young, Murray, Stein, and Kringelbach, 2010). As such the parent-infant relationship reflects a biological necessity, ultimately to ensure the survival of the species (Darwin, 1872). Indeed, the systems motivating parental behavior appear to be largely conserved across mammalian species (Numan and Insel, 2003).
