A study of 30,000 parents across 6 international cohorts reveals that parental genes are linked with the investments that parents make in their offspring, from adopting more healthy behaviours during pregnancy to leaving wealth to adult children. The findings suggest that parental alleles that are not transmitted can affect children through influencing the environments that parents create for their children over the course of their lives.
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References
Scarr, S. & McCartney, K. How people make their own environments: a theory of genotype→ environment effects. Child Dev. 54, 424–435 (1983). This review sets out a theory of how experience is directed by genotypes, both of parents who create environments for their children, and of children who evoke and select environments.
Kong, A. et al. The nature of nurture: effects of parental genotypes. Science 359, 424–428 (2018). This paper reports that genetic variants in parents affect child outcomes, even if the child does not inherit the allele.
Lee, J. J. et al. Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nat. Genet. 50, 1112–1121 (2018). This paper reports associations between genetic variants and educational attainment in 1.2 million individuals. These results form the basis for the polygenic score that we used.
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This is a summary of: Wertz, J. et al. Genetic associations with parental investment from conception to wealth inheritance in six cohorts. Nat. Hum. Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01618-5 (2023).
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Genes influence parental investment in their child from conception to writing a will. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1253–1254 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01619-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01619-4
