Does Competition Erase Parental Love, or Reallocate It?
Does Competition Erase Parental Love, or Reallocate It?
Recently, I came across a news article introducing the following paper:
Rogers, F.D., Kim, S., Mereby, S.A. et al.
Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10123-4
This study examined African striped mice (Rhabdomys pumilio), a species in which paternal care varies strikingly even within the same species, and focused on Agouti signalling protein in the medial preoptic area (MPOA).
The authors found that individuals showing more paternal care tended to have lower Agouti expression, whereas individuals showing neglect, aggression, or infanticidal behavior toward pups showed higher Agouti expression. They also found that Agouti expression increased under conditions of stronger social competition and decreased when competitive pressure was lower. Moreover, when Agouti levels were experimentally elevated in a naturalistic context, individuals that had previously shown caregiving behavior began to display neglect, aggression, and even infanticidal behavior toward pups.
What makes this especially interesting is that the effect did not seem to be driven simply by immediate hunger or food deprivation. Rather, it suggested that paternal behavior may reflect the integration of broader and more persistent environmental conditions.
This immediately raises a question:
In highly competitive environments, might a parent allocate more energy and attention to defending themselves and their family against outside threats, such that direct caregiving behavior declines?
This interpretation is different from simply saying that “parental love disappears.” It suggests, instead, that parental investment may be reallocated. In other words, caregiving may not merely decrease; limited energy and regulatory resources may be shifted toward external defense, territorial maintenance, and survival-related demands.
One may even consider a further mediating hypothesis. Across species, competitive pressure is often associated with context-dependent increases in testosterone, in both males and females, although absolute levels and response patterns vary across individuals. If hormonal changes of this kind interact with Agouti-related circuits or gene expression, then competition may function not merely as “stress,” but as a biological signal that reorganizes parental investment strategies.
Of course, these findings cannot be directly mapped onto human society. Human beings live within much more complex social and cultural systems, shaped by institutions, language, symbolic meaning, and relational norms. Still, the paper opens an important conceptual question:
What happens to secure attachment formation in children when parents live under intense social pressure?
This question can be considered alongside the following studies:
Eckstein-Madry T, Piskernik B, Ahnert L.
Attachment and stress regulation in socioeconomically disadvantaged children: Can public childcare compensate? Infant Ment Health J. 2021;42(6):839–850.
Jiang Y, Zhang J, Shi K and Wang X.
The relationship between parental intimacy quality and young children’s emotional and behavioral problems: the chain mediating role of parenting stress and parent-child relationship. Front. Psychiatry (2025).
Taken together, these studies suggest that in environments of high social pressure, parental energy and attention may be pulled away from child-centered regulation and redirected toward external threat management, livelihood maintenance, and social evaluation. As a result, children may receive less consistent sensitivity, emotional availability, and predictable caregiving, which could reduce the likelihood of secure attachment formation.
Secure attachment depends not simply on the amount of affection a parent feels, but on the child’s ability to return from states of threat or distress to a state of stability through co-regulation. This, in turn, depends heavily on caregiving that is consistent, sensitive, and predictable.
This point is echoed in the following reviews:
Santana-Ferrándiz M, Ibáñez-Pérez J, Moret-Tatay C.
Empathy and Parental Sensitivity in Child Attachment and Socioemotional Development: A Systematic Review from Emotional, Genetic, and Neurobiological Perspectives. Children (Basel). 2025;12(4):465.
Ye ZY, Han ZY, Zhong BL.
Family functioning and anxiety in children: a narrative review. Transl Pediatr. 2025;14(9):2311–2320.
Under strong social pressure, parents may become more overprotective, or conversely less emotionally available. In either case, the child’s secure base function—their capacity to explore the world and return to a stable relational anchor—may weaken, with negative consequences for emotional regulation and socioemotional development.
This interpretation also aligns with the following work:
Venard G, Zimmermann G, Antonietti JP, Nunes CE, Van Petegem S.
Parenting Under Pressure: Associations between Perceived Social Pressure and Parental Involvement among Mothers and Fathers. J Child Fam Stud. 2024;33(12):3813–3825.
Yu S, Liao M, Liu X, Li Y.
The relationship between parenting stress and preschool children’s social-emotional competence: the chain mediating role of parental reflective functioning and parent-child relationship. Front Psychol. 2025;16:1679084.
From this perspective, competitive environments may not simply reduce parental care; they may reallocate caregiving resources toward external defense and survival demands. The real problem is that, in this process, the stable regulation children need may be left unfilled.
This leads to an even more important question:
If parents know how to communicate their inner state to a child in the right way, could the child still be qualitatively fulfilled even when emotional availability is reduced?
Conversely, if parents do not know how to communicate that state, pressure may be translated to the child not as a signal of safety, but as a signal of threat. This may then contribute to verbal abuse, domestic violence, emotional neglect, insecure attachment, aggression, externalizing problems, and delinquent behavior.
In the end, the core issue may not be simply that the total amount of parental emotional resources decreases, but rather how that condition is translated into regulatory signals for the child.
Put differently:
The problem is not social pressure alone, but what happens when that pressure is not regulated and is instead transmitted to the child in the form of threat.
Summary and Conclusion
In the Agouti paper, the authors were cautious about whether the same mechanism can be directly applied to humans.Human beings live in far more complex social and cultural environments than Rhabdomys pumilio.
Still, when the findings of this paper are considered together with the human studies reviewed above, a useful insight emerges:
Competition and social pressure may not simply reduce parenting, but reallocate parental energy and regulatory resources toward external defense and survival-related demands.
In that process, the stable and predictable co-regulation that children need may weaken.
What matters, then, may be not merely whether love exists, but whether that love can be translated into signals of stability that the child can actually receive.
Future research, then, should move beyond simply stating that “stress worsens parenting.” Instead, it should ask:
What kinds of social institutions should be designed so that social pressure does not collapse the regulatory resources required for parenting?
And:
How can we support and teach parent-child signaling systems such that, even under constrained emotional resources, children can still receive stability rather than threat?
I suspect that this is one of the important questions future research will need to confront.
References
- Rogers, F.D., Kim, S., Mereby, S.A. et al. Agouti integrates environmental cues to regulate paternal behaviour. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10123-4
- Eckstein-Madry T, Piskernik B, Ahnert L. Attachment and stress regulation in socioeconomically disadvantaged children: Can public childcare compensate? Infant Ment Health J. 2021 Nov;42(6):839-850. doi: 10.1002/imhj.21878. Epub 2020 Jul 13. PMID: 32657459; PMCID: PMC9291155.
- Jiang Y, Zhang J, Shi K and Wang X (2025) The relationship between parental intimacy quality and young children’s emotional and behavioral problems: the chain mediating role of parenting stress and parent-child relationship. Front. Psychiatry 16:1652814. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1652814
- Santana-Ferrándiz M, Ibáñez-Pérez J, Moret-Tatay C. Empathy and Parental Sensitivity in Child Attachment and Socioemotional Development: A Systematic Review from Emotional, Genetic, and Neurobiological Perspectives. Children (Basel). 2025 Apr 4;12(4):465. doi: 10.3390/children12040465. PMID: 40310085; PMCID: PMC12025558.
- Ye ZY, Han ZY, Zhong BL. Family functioning and anxiety in children: a narrative review. Transl Pediatr. 2025 Sep 30;14(9):2311-2320. doi: 10.21037/tp-2025-324. Epub 2025 Sep 4. PMID: 41141678; PMCID: PMC12552171.
- Venard G, Zimmermann G, Antonietti JP, Nunes CE, Van Petegem S. Parenting Under Pressure: Associations between Perceived Social Pressure and Parental Involvement among Mothers and Fathers. J Child Fam Stud. 2024;33(12):3813-3825. doi: 10.1007/s10826-024-02945-5. Epub 2024 Nov 8. PMID: 39649242; PMCID: PMC11624238.
- Yu S, Liao M, Liu X, Li Y. The relationship between parenting stress and preschool children’s social-emotional competence: the chain mediating role of parental reflective functioning and parent-child relationship. Front Psychol. 2025 Sep 23;16:1679084. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1679084. PMID: 41064174; PMCID: PMC12500748.
- Paula Cristina Martins, Catarina Dias Matos, Ana Isabel Sani,Parental stress and risk of child abuse: The role of socioeconomic status, Children and Youth Services Review,
Volume 148, 2023, 106879, ISSN 0190-7409, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2023.106879. - Neppl TK, Senia JM, Donnellan MB. Effects of economic hardship: Testing the family stress model over time. J Fam Psychol. 2016 Feb;30(1):12-21. doi: 10.1037/fam0000168. Epub 2015 Nov 9. PMID: 26551658; PMCID: PMC4742411.
- Geniole SN, Bird BM, Ruddick EL, Carré JM. Effects of competition outcome on testosterone concentrations in humans: An updated meta-analysis. Horm Behav. 2017 Jun;92:37-50. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.10.002. Epub 2016 Oct 6. PMID: 27720891.
- Knight EL, Sarkar A, Prasad S, Mehta PH. Beyond the challenge hypothesis: The emergence of the dual-hormone hypothesis and recommendations for future research. Horm Behav. 2020 Jul;123:104657. doi: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2019.104657. Epub 2020 Jan 2. PMID: 31863735; PMCID: PMC7311256.
- Carré JM, Archer J. Testosterone and human behavior: the role of individual and contextual variables. Curr Opin Psychol. 2018 Feb;19:149-153. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.03.021. Epub 2017 Apr 6. PMID: 29279215.
- van Anders SM, Steiger J, Goldey KL. Effects of gendered behavior on testosterone in women and men. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Nov 10;112(45):13805-10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1509591112. Epub 2015 Oct 26. PMID: 26504229; PMCID: PMC4653185.
- Handelsman DJ, Hirschberg AL, Bermon S. Circulating Testosterone as the Hormonal Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance. Endocr Rev. 2018 Oct 1;39(5):803-829. doi: 10.1210/er.2018-00020. PMID: 30010735; PMCID: PMC6391653.
