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Even bird families can share parental responsibilities, which benefits them immensely, say researchers from the University of Sheffield, who studied long-tailed tits that shared the tasks of feeding their babies.

It not only helped the babies to survive but also made them raise success stories.

"Parents with a young baby often take turns to do the grueling night-time feeds so that neither of them gets too exhausted," Kat Bebbington, lead author of the study, said in a news release. "This is a situation we are all familiar with as humans, but there's almost no evidence for animals doing this in nature."

Those parent birds who take rest and share the task of feeding their young do better jobs that those work too hard and feed them "intermittently" explain researchers.

"Our research shows that for long-tailed tits, at least, coordinating and alternating parental responsibilities like feeding can mean the difference between life and death for chicks," Bebbington added.

These long-tailed tits, or Aegithalidae, have small bodies, long tails, short legs and tiny bills. They can be located all over U.K. They live in woods or hedgerows, feeding on insects and also seeds in the fall and winter seasons.

The strategy that both the parents follow makes them visit the nest simultaneously in order to see that they spend less time flying around and luring foxes or other predators. It also helps them both to alternate the feeding time.

"Most animals provide care for their young, but birds and people are unusual because care is often provided by both parents. This situation generates conflict between the parents because each of them would like their partner to take a greater share of parenting effort," Bebbington explained. "How parents negotiate to resolve this conflict has rarely been investigated, but 'tit-for-tat' alternation of visits provides one potential solution to the problem."

This study helps us to understand the evolution of parenting. It was published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

 "This "tit-for-tat" style bargaining might also work in other areas of life - at work we all negotiate our tasks with others to make sure the workload is shared, and in nature animals can do the same when feeding offspring, fighting predators or sharing food," Bebbington said.