What is the evolutionary and biological purpose of wanting to please your parents?

Question

Why do people want to please their parents? Why do people want their parents to be proud of them and approve of them? What is the purpose of people having this need?

But why do we seek these things so much from our parents??? As opposed to someone else?

Answer 1

The urge to please parents is as old and for the same purpose as the urge parents have to nurture their babies. Survival of the species!! Obedience to our elders may not be a matter of life and death quite so often any more, but in cave man times, if a child was disobedient, he got eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or something!! It had to be like an instinct, or natural selection took care of the ignorant ones.
As the child grew, he relied on his parents (or more often just his mother, as the fathers were much the same as modern days, and took off after a couple of years) to teach him all the skills he needed to live to adulthood and through it. If he ignored what he was shown, he didn't eat, quite simply. So there was an inbuilt need for the approval of his elders.
Unfortunately, this in-built thing is still carrying on in the species, as I have found to my detriment many times. My life would have been a lot easier if I could have kicked my habit of trying to please my dad!

(And in my opinion, the strong parental-love is for the same reason. Anybody who has ever been awake for three days straight with a screaming newborn will agree that if you didn't feel an unreasoning love for the little tyke, you'd put the thing out for the hyenas just to shut it up by the end of the third day!!!)

Answer 2

Everyone wants approval, acceptance and love. Sometime this leads to good actions, bad action some times is a cry for the same thing.

Answer 3

We enjoy the strokes we get from them. It is nice to recieve neural activation and we know how to get that from our parents.

Answer 4

love