alloparent

plural alloparents

1. biologyAn adult animal or person involved in parent-like behaviour towards an individual that is not their offspring.First known use 20th c.

   In non-humans, alloparents include relatives who have kin-based incentives to help and nonrelatives who are under coercive threat or have no better option for survival.

   2016, Joseph Henrich, chapter 16, in The Secret of Our Success […] , Princeton: Princeton University Press, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   And Hrdy further suggests that the immersion of human babies in a pool of alloparents would have honed the mind-reading skills and empathy that are so important to our species, faster than anything else.

   2011, Chris Stringer, The Origin of Our Species, Penguin, published 2012, page 142

   Maybe my kids should spend more time with my sister and her kids. Maybe my colleague who has kids around the same age as mine, we should do more sleepovers. So there are all sorts of ways in which could imagine just bringing other alloparents into a relationship.

   2023 June 9, Ezra Klein, quoting Kristen Ghodsee, “The Ezra Klein Show: What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   Synonyms: bonus parent