Parenting and Heritability Overview - Otium
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/parenting-and-heritability-overview/
Parenting and Heritability Overview - Otium
Complexity: 6 Rating: 7
What Parenting Can’t Affect
Personality, IQ, reading ability in teenagers, and income are affected negligibly by the “shared environment” contribution. Drug abuse is also very heritable and not much affected by parenting.
What Parenting Might Affect
Reading ability in children and grades in teenagers have a sizable (but minority) shared environment component; reading ability in toddlers is mostly affected by shared environment. Grades are generally less IQ-correlated than test scores, and are highly affected by school engagement and levels of “externalizing” behavior (disruptive behavior, inattention, criminal/delinquent activity.) Antisocial and criminal behavior has a sizable (but minority) shared environment component. You may be able to influence your kids to behave better and study harder, and you can definitely teach your kids to read younger, though a lot of this may turn out to be a wash by the time your kids reach adulthood.
What Parenting Can Affect
Having a mother — even an adoptive mother, but not a father — with major depression puts children at risk for major depression, drug abuse, and externalizing behavior. Conflict at home also predicts externalizing behavior in teenagers. Mothers of teenagers who treat them well are more likely to have teenagers who have loving and secure relationships with them. Basically, if I were to draw a conclusion from this, it would be that it’s good to have a peaceful and loving home and a mentally healthy mom.
Father’s income and family income, but not mother’s income, predicts years of schooling; I’m guessing that this is because richer families can afford to send their kids to school for longer. You can, obviously, help your kids go to college by paying for it.
