What Do We Owe Our Children?

The lioness from a pride of lions on the African savanna hunts tirelessly, risking her life against larger prey, to get food to share with her cubs. Yet her offspring will never be expected to hunt for her when she’s old. No elder lions demand their adult children bring them zebra meat in exchange for their early care. This pattern repeats across the natural world — parental investment flows forward, never backward.

Yet somehow, Homo sapiens managed to engineer something unprecedented in the history of life on Earth: the belief that children owe their parents a debt for being born.

For roughly 3.8 billion years, life operated on a simple algorithm: parents invest in offspring to propel their genes into the future. This wasn’t a moral choice but a successful replication strategy. Those who protected and nurtured their young simply passed on more genes than those who didn’t. No species evolved an expectation of reverse care flow — it would have been evolutionary suicide.

Even our closest primate relatives follow this forward-flowing pattern. Chimpanzee mothers invest years in their offspring but never demand reciprocal care in their old age. The very concept would be alien to them.

The Agricultural Revolution’s Great Reversal