Mother's social status is associated with child health in a horticulturalist population

Abstract

High social status is often associated with greater mating opportunities and fertility for men, but do women also obtain fitness benefits of high status? Greater resource access and child survivorship may be principal pathways through which social status increases women's fitness. Here, we examine whether peer-rankings of women's social status (indicated by political influence, project leadership, and respect) positively covaries with child nutritional status and health in a community of Amazonian horticulturalists. We find that maternal political influence is associated with improved child health outcomes in models adjusting for maternal age, parental height and weight, level of schooling, household income, family size, and number of kin in the community. Children of politically influential women have higher weight-for-age (B = 0.33; 95% CI = 0.12-0.54), height-for-age (B = 0.32; 95% CI = 0.10-0.54), and weight-for-height (B = 0.24; 95% CI = 0.04-0.44), and they are less likely to be diagnosed with common illnesses (OR = 0.48; 95% CI = 0.31-0.76). These results are consistent with women leveraging their social status to enhance reproductive success through improvements in child health. We discuss these results in light of parental investment theory and the implications for the evolution of female social status in humans.

Keywords: Amazonian horticulturalists; Tsimane; child health; reproductive success; social status; women's social status.

Figure 1.

Conceptual pathways from parental social status to child health outcomes.

Figure 2.

Parental political influence and child nutritional status. Standardized estimates from linear mixed models of the relationship between parental political influence and children's anthropometrics (population-specific z-scores) indicated by circles for all children, squares for children ages 0–5, and diamonds for children ages 6–16; size of the shapes is proportional to sample size; bars denote 95% CIs; models adjusting for age, sex, mother's age, both parents' height and weight, household income, years of schooling, and number of co-resident kin in the community. See electronic supplementary material, tables S3 and S4, for parameter estimates. (Online version in colour.)

Figure 3.

Predicted probabilities of being diagnosed with common illnesses as a function of maternal political influence for children ages 0–16. Models adjusting for maternal age, parental height and weight, household income, years of schooling, live births, and number of co-resident kin in the community (n = 255). (Online version in colour.)