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46-395: An ancestor , also known as a forefather , fore-elder , or a forebear , is a parent or ( recursively ) the parent of an antecedent (i.e., a grandparent , great-grandparent , great-great-grandparent and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law, the person from whom an estate has been inherited ." Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one
92-575: A widow's peak , or the cleft chin , may serve as tentative indicators of (non-) parenthood as they are readily observable and inherited via autosomal-dominant genes. A more reliable way to ascertain parenthood is via DNA analysis (known as genetic fingerprinting of individuals), although older methods have included ABO blood group typing , analysis of various other proteins and enzymes , or using human leukocyte antigens . The current techniques for paternity testing are using polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism . For
138-602: A child aside from the biological relationship. A child has at least one biological father and at least one biological mother , but not every family is a traditional nuclear family . There are many variants, such as adoption , shared parenting , stepfamilies , and LGBT parenting , over which there has been controversy. The social science literature rejects the notion that there is an optimal gender mix of parents or that children and adolescents with same-sex parents suffer any developmental disadvantages compared with those with two opposite-sex parents. The professionals and
184-404: A legal guardian without a formal court appointment. In such circumstances the parent acting in that capacity is called the natural guardian of that parent's child. Parenting or child rearing is the process of promoting and supporting the physical , emotional , social, financial, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood . Parenting refers to the aspects of raising
230-402: A minor, and guardianship for developmentally disabled adults. Most countries and states have laws that provide that the parents of a minor child are the legal guardians of that child, and that the parents can designate who shall become the child's legal guardian in the event of death, subject to the approval of the court. Some jurisdictions allow a parent of a child to exercise the authority of
276-486: A parent through surrogacy . Some parents may be adoptive parents, who nurture and raise an offspring, but are not related to the child. Orphans without adoptive parents can be raised by their grandparents or other family members . A parent can also be elaborated as an ancestor removed one generation . With recent medical advances, it is possible to have more than two biological parents. Examples of third biological parents include instances involving surrogacy or
322-460: A pregnancy involving embryo transfer or egg donation , it is obvious who the mother is. However, it is used in a number of events such as legal battles where a person's maternity is challenged, where the mother is uncertain because she has not seen her child for an extended period of time, or where deceased persons need to be identified. Although not constituting completely reliable evidence, several congenital traits such as attached earlobes ,
368-502: A third person who has provided DNA samples during an assisted reproductive procedure that has altered the recipients' genetic material. The most common types of parents are mothers , fathers , step-parents , and grandparents . A mother is "a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth." The extent to which it is socially acceptable for a parent to be involved in their offspring's life varies from culture to culture, however one that exhibits too little involvement
414-515: Is a male parent of any type of offspring. It may be the person who shares in the raising of a child or who has provided the biological material, the sperm , which results in the birth of the child. Grandparents are the parents of a person's own parent, whether that be a father or a mother. Every sexually reproducing creature who is not a genetic chimera has a maximum of four genetic grandparents, eight genetic great-grandparents , sixteen genetic great-great-grandparents and so on. Rarely, such as in
460-515: Is a stepmother of one's spouse. Stepparents (mainly stepmothers) may also face some societal challenges due to the stigma surrounding the "evil stepmother" character. Morello notes that the introduction of the "evil stepmother" character in the past is problematic to stepparents today, as it has created a stigma towards stepmothers. The presence of this stigma can have a negative impact on stepmothers' self-esteem. In fiction, stepmothers are often portrayed as being wicked and evil . The character of
506-528: Is known that stepmothers are evil, the actual stepmother is guilty of nothing more than some carelessness, to Erma Bombeck 's retelling where Cinderella is lazy and a liar. More subtly, Piers Anthony depicted the Princess Threnody as being cursed by her stepmother in Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn : if she ever entered Castle Roogna, it would fall down. But Threnody explains that her presence at
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#1732773164402552-573: Is shown later on when Giselle marries that girl's father, who had her from a previous marriage, thus becoming a stepmother herself. As Giselle is a sweet and caring woman, she makes a good wife and stepmother. However, it is notable that during much of that film, Giselle was more of an older sister figure than a maternal figure to that little girl. In the movie Nanny McPhee a group of children worry that their father will remarry, believing from their fairy tales that all stepmothers are an "evil breed." Although they help their father marry again to help keep
598-438: Is sometimes said to exhibit child neglect , while one that is too involved is sometimes said to be overprotective , cosseting, nosey , or intrusive . A person's biological parents are the persons from whom the individual inherits their genes . The term is generally only used if there is a need to distinguish an individual's parents from their biological parents, For example, an individual whose father has remarried may call
644-706: Is suggested by peculiar wording in John Gamble's "An Irish Wake" (1826). He writes of a woman soon to die, who instructs her successor to "be kind to my children." Gamble writes that the injunction was forgotten and that she "proved a very step-mother." Fairy tales can have variants where one tale has an evil mother and the other an evil stepmother: in The Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm and also in The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen ,
690-427: Is the ancestor of the other or if they share a common ancestor. In evolutionary theory, species which share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent . However, this concept of ancestry does not apply to some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer . Some research suggests that the average person has twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. This might have been due to
736-411: Is the junior brother; the king pardoned them both for her devotion to duty. The ubiquity of the wicked stepmother has made it a frequent theme of revisionist fairy tale fantasy . This can range from Tanith Lee 's Red as Blood , where the stepmother queen is desperately trying to protect the land from her evil stepdaughter's magic, to Diana Wynne Jones 's Howl's Moving Castle , where, although it
782-464: Is when people seek providence from their deceased ancestors. Parent A parent is either the progenitor of a child or, in humans , it can refer to a caregiver or legal guardian , generally called an adoptive parent or step-parent . The gametes of a parent result in a child, a male through the sperm, and a female through the ovum. Parents who are progenitors are first-degree relatives and have 50% genetic meet. A female can also become
828-660: The Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella , where Aschenputtel receives her clothing from a tree growing on her mother's grave, the Russian Vasilissa the Beautiful , where Vasilissa is aided by a doll her mother gave, and her mother's blessing, and the Malay Bawang Putih Bawang Merah , where the heroine's mother comes back as fish to protect her. The notion of the word stepmother being descriptive of an intrinsically unkind parent
874-434: The "evil stepmother" belief, as the villainess is a stepmother, but her wickedness comes from her selfishness and power hungriness rather than the simple fact she is a stepmother. When a little girl tells the heroine Giselle that all stepmothers are evil, Giselle reminds her that she personally knows some wonderful women who were good stepmothers, and the fact a woman is a stepmother does not suddenly change her personality. This
920-590: The American soap opera One Life to Live . In contrast to many other Disney -related media, the animated series Phineas and Ferb features a stepfamily in which both parents get along well with their three children (avoiding the normal tropes of evil stepparents). 438 BCE: The dying biological mother requests that her husband not remarry, for fear of her children being mistreated by a stepmother. 428 BCE: The stepmother commits suicide to prevent herself from following through on her lust for her stepson and leaves
966-533: The Golden Stars . In some fairy tales, such as Giambattista Basile 's La Gatta Cennerentola or the Danish Green Knight , the stepmother wins the marriage by ingratiating herself with the stepdaughter, and once she obtains it, becomes cruel. In some fairy tales, the stepdaughter's escape by marrying does not free her from her stepmother. After the birth of the stepdaughter's first child,
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#17327731644021012-408: The case of sibling or half-sibling incest , these numbers are lower . A paternity test is conducted to prove paternity, that is, whether a male is the biological father of another individual. This may be relevant in view of rights and duties of the father. Similarly, a maternity test can be carried out. This is less common, because at least during childbirth and pregnancy , except in the case of
1058-437: The castle caused her father to dote on her and neglect his duties to the destruction of the kingdom; her stepmother had merely made her destructive potential literal, and forced her to confront what she was doing. The character of the evil stepmother can also be found in the genre of young adult fiction or young adult social problem novels. In Lisa Heathfield's Paper Butterflies . the protagonist June suffers horrific abuse at
1104-462: The children of the first marriage for resources; the tales can be interpreted as factual conflicts from history. In some fairy tales, such as The Juniper Tree , the stepmother's hostility is overtly the desire to secure the inheritance of her children. Stepmothers also make many appearances in Chinese tales of family. Wicked stepmothers are common. In Classic of Filial Piety , Guo Jujing told
1150-446: The family together, their soon-to-be stepmother is very cruel, as they suspected. When the wedding to her is called off, the father decides to marry the much kinder scullery maid, causing one child to comment that the evil stepmother personification does not apply to her. Stepmother relationships are often examined in soap operas . An example of this is the long-running rivalry between Victoria Lord Banks and stepmother Dorian Lord on
1196-432: The father's new wife their stepmother and continue to refer to their mother normally, though someone who has had little or no contact with their biological mother may address their foster parent as their mother, and their biological mother as such, or perhaps by her first name. A mother is a female who has a maternal connection with another individual, whether arising from conception , by giving birth to, or raising
1242-415: The first child, but having higher-order children is not associated with further increased well-being. Happiness seems to increase most in the year before and after the first childbirth. Stepmother A stepmother , stepmum or stepmom is a female non-biological parent married to one's preexisting parent. Children from her spouse's previous unions are known as her stepchildren . A stepmother-in-law
1288-581: The hands of her stepmother, a fact that she conceals from her father. Despite many examples of evil or cruel stepmothers, loving stepmothers also exist in fiction. In Kevin and Kell , Kell is portrayed as loving her stepdaughter Lindesfarne, whom her husband Kevin had adopted during his previous marriage. Likewise, Lindesfarne considers Kell her mother, and has a considerably more favorable view of her than Angelique, Kevin's ex-wife and her adoptive mother, due to feeling neglected by Angelique during her childhood. The Disney film Enchanted also makes references to
1334-482: The heroine is persecuted by her husband's mother and in another one by her stepmother, and in The Twelve Wild Ducks , by his stepmother. Sometimes this appears to be a deliberate switch: The Brothers Grimm , having put in their first editions versions of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel where the villain was the biological mother, altered it to a stepmother in later editions, perhaps to mitigate
1380-402: The human species is more than 40 generations old, yet the number 2, approximately 10 or one trillion, dwarfs the number of humans who have ever lived . Some cultures confer reverence to ancestors, both living and dead; in contrast, some more youth-oriented cultural contexts display less veneration of elders. In other cultural contexts, ancestor worship or, more accurately, ancestor veneration
1426-413: The individual in the role of a parent. More than one female may have such connections with an individual. Because of the complexity and differences of a mother's social, cultural, and religious definitions and roles, it is challenging to define a mother to suit a universally accepted definition. The utilization of a surrogate mother may result in explication of there being two biological mothers. A father
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1472-408: The major associations now agree there is a well-established and accepted consensus in the field that there is no optimal gender combination of parents. The family studies literature indicates that it is family processes (such as the quality of parenting and relationships within the family) that contribute to determining children's well-being and "outcomes", rather than family structures, per se, such as
1518-410: The most part, however, genetic fingerprinting has all but taken over all the other forms of testing. A legal guardian is a person who has the legal authority (and the corresponding duty) to care for the personal and property interests of another person, called a ward. Guardians are typically used in three situations: guardianship for an incapacitated senior (due to old age or infirmity), guardianship for
1564-441: The number of offspring, the offspring can increase their fitness by getting a greater share of parental investment often by competing with their siblings . The theory was proposed by Robert Trivers in 1974 and extends the more general selfish gene theory and has been used to explain many observed biological phenomena. For example, in some bird species, although parents often lay two eggs and attempt to raise two or more young,
1610-408: The number, gender, sexuality and co-habitation status of parents. An offspring who hates their father is called a misopater, one that hates their mother is a misomater, while a parent that hates their offspring is a misopedist. Parent–offspring conflict describes the evolutionary conflict arising from differences in optimal fitness of parents and their offspring . While parents tend to maximize
1656-468: The past prevalence of polygynous relations and female hypergamy . Assuming that all of an individual's ancestors are otherwise unrelated to each other, that individual has 2 ancestors in the n th generation before them and a total of 2 − 2 ancestors in the g generations before them. In practice, however, it is clear that most ancestors of humans (and any other species) are multiply related (see pedigree collapse ). Consider n = 40:
1702-533: The prince like a fairy godmother , but this figure is very rare in fairy tales. The stepmother may be identified with other evils the characters meet. For instance, both the stepmother and the witch in Hansel and Gretel are deeply concerned with food, the stepmother to avoid hunger, the witch with her house built of food and her desire to eat the children, and when the children kill the witch and return home, their stepmother has mysteriously died. This hostility from
1748-410: The sensitivity of the mother to insulin and thus make a larger supply of blood sugar available to the fetus. The mother responds by increasing the level of insulin in her bloodstream, the placenta has insulin receptors that stimulate the production of insulin-degrading enzymes which counteract this effect. In Europe, parents are generally happier than non-parents. In women, happiness increases after
1794-406: The stepmother and tenderness from the true mother has been interpreted in varying ways. A psychological interpretation, by Bruno Bettelheim , describes it as "splitting" the actual mother in an ideal mother and a false mother that contains what the child dislikes in the actual mother. However, historically, many women died in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with
1840-408: The stepmother kills her own stepdaughters. In many stories with evil stepmothers, the hostility between the stepmother and the stepchild is underscored by having the child succeed through aid from the dead mother. This motif occurs from Norse mythology , where Svipdagr rouses his mother Gróa from the grave so as to learn from her how to accomplish a task his stepmother set, to fairy tales such as
1886-632: The stepmother may attempt to murder the new mother and replace her with her own daughter—thus making her the stepmother to the next generation. Such a replacement occurs in The Wonderful Birch , Brother and Sister , and The Three Little Men in the Wood ; only by foiling the stepmother's plot (and usually executing her), is the story brought to a happy ending. In the Korean Folktale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon ,
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1932-518: The story of Min Ziqian , who had lost his mother at a young age. His stepmother had two more sons and saw to it that they were warmly dressed in winter but neglected her stepson. When her husband discovered this, he decided to divorce her. His son interceded, on the ground that she neglected only him, but when they had no mother, all three sons would be neglected. His father relented, and the stepmother henceforth took care of all three children. For this, he
1978-465: The story's violence. Another reason for the change from a villainous mother to a villainous stepmother may have been the belief that mothers were sacred, as well as the belief that people would not believe that a mother could harbor such ill-will and animosity toward their child. The Icelandic fairy tale The Horse Gullfaxi and the Sword Gunnfoder features a good stepmother, who indeed aids
2024-423: The strongest fledgling takes a greater share of the food brought by parents and will often kill the weaker sibling, an act known as siblicide . David Haig has argued that human fetal genes would be selected to draw more resources from the mother than it would be optimal for the mother to give, a hypothesis that has received empirical support. The placenta , for example, secretes allocrine hormones that decrease
2070-756: The wicked stepmother features heavily in fairy tales ; the most famous examples are Cinderella , Snow White and Hansel and Gretel . Stepdaughters are her most common victim, and then stepdaughter/stepson pairs, but stepsons also are victims as in The Juniper Tree —sometimes, as in East of the Sun and West of the Moon , because he refused to marry his stepsister as she wished, or, indeed, they may make their stepdaughters-in-law their victims, as in The Boys with
2116-428: Was held up as a model of filial piety . Conversely, the exemplary stepmother prefers the stepson to her own child, in recognition that his seniority makes him superior. The "righteous stepmother of Qi", faced with her son and stepson having been found by a murdered man, and both having confessed to shield the other, argues for her son's execution because her husband had ordered her to look after her stepson, and her son
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