The Nature of Nurture: Using a Virtual-Parent Design to Test Parenting Effects on Children's Educational Attainment in Genotyped Families

Abstract

Research on environmental and genetic pathways to complex traits such as educational attainment (EA) is confounded by uncertainty over whether correlations reflect effects of transmitted parental genes, causal family environments, or some, possibly interactive, mixture of both. Thus, an aggregate of thousands of alleles associated with EA (a polygenic risk score; PRS) may tap parental behaviors and home environments promoting EA in the offspring. New methods for unpicking and determining these causal pathways are required. Here, we utilize the fact that parents pass, at random, 50% of their genome to a given offspring to create independent scores for the transmitted alleles (conventional EA PRS) and a parental score based on alleles not transmitted to the offspring (EA VP_PRS). The formal effect of non-transmitted alleles on offspring attainment was tested in 2,333 genotyped twins for whom high-quality measures of EA, assessed at age 17 years, were available, and whose parents were also genotyped. Four key findings were observed. First, the EA PRS and EA VP_PRS were empirically independent, validating the virtual-parent design. Second, in this family-based design, children's own EA PRS significantly predicted their EA (β = 0.15), ruling out stratification confounds as a cause of the association of attainment with the EA PRS. Third, parental EA PRS predicted the SES environment parents provided to offspring (β = 0.20), and parental SES and offspring EA were significantly associated (β = 0.33). This would suggest that the EA PRS is at least as strongly linked to social competence as it is to EA, leading to higher attained SES in parents and, therefore, a higher experienced SES for children. In a full structural equation model taking account of family genetic relatedness across multiple siblings the non-transmitted allele effects were estimated at similar values; but, in this more complex model, confidence intervals included zero. A test using the forthcoming EA3 PRS may clarify this outcome. The virtual-parent method may be applied to clarify causality in other phenotypes where observational evidence suggests parenting may moderate expression of other outcomes, for instance in psychiatry.

Can education be personalised using pupils’ genetic data?

“…Second, the educational attainment polygenic score that we use was based on a GWAS of years of education rather than exam scores. Years of education can be considered a more social measure of education than exam performance, and previous work has demonstrated that the educational attainment polygenic score strongly reflects parental social position (and through this access to further or higher education) 31 .Future research could investigate this possibility by conducting a GWAS on detailed standardized exam scores on a large sample. Third, while the educational attainment polygenic score accounts for around 13% of the variance in years of education in our data, increases to this from future metaanalyses will provide greater power.…”

Associations between an educational attainment polygenic score with educational attainment in an African American sample

“…In terms of the latter, recent work supports the importance of the caregiving environment in fostering or hindering children's educational attainment. For example, Bates et al examined whether parents' genetic propensity for educational attainment affected their children's educational attainment, while taking into account genetic relatedness between parents and their children. The authors found that parents' genetic propensity for educational attainment was positively associated with children's educational attainment when taking into account nontransmitted alleles, highlighting that parents with a higher EA PGS may create an environment that fosters their children's learning potential .…”

“…21 Individuals with lower cognitive ability may be more likely to engage in criminal behavior, potentially because they may experience executive function deficits, such as a decreased ability to problem solve, engage in self-control and anticipate the consequences The authors found that parents' genetic propensity for educational attainment was positively associated with children's educational attainment when taking into account nontransmitted alleles, highlighting that parents with a higher EA PGS may create an environment that fosters their children's learning potential. 61,62 A next step in our work is to examine causal pathways that might be associated with higher education status.…”

Physical and Cultural Inheritance Enhance Agency, but What are the Origins of this Concern to Establish a Legacy? A Nationally-Representative Twin Study of Erikson’s Concept of Generativity

“…The results also suggest that an expectation of zero C effects, for all behavior genetic traits, may be premature, not only because of GE covariance in different forms (Bates et al 2018; Plomin 1994; Turkheimer and Waldron 2000), but also for simply a lack of power to detect C relative to A (Neale and Maes 1996), ability to capitalize on aggressive dropping of blocks of paths masking significant effects within these large blocks, and inherent biases of the Cholesky model as a baseline against which to test significance of the shared environment (Verhulst et al, under review).…”

“…Research capitalizing on advances in molecular genetics (Kong et al 2018; Okbay et al 2016) has further supported the family as a system for enhancing agency as reflected in offspring educational attainment (Bates et al 2018). Research has also, however, been extended to examine upward social mobility (Belsky et al 2018b) and to identify effects of the macro environment such as neighborhood on traits associated with agency, for instance obesity, mental health, teen-pregnancy, and poor educational outcomes (Belsky et al 2018a, b).…”