Nature shaping nurture: the impact of parental genotypes on offspring outcomes
Nature shaping nurture: the impact of parental genotypes on offspring outcomes
Children often resemble their parents in behavior and life outcomes. Traditionally, these similarities are explained by genes that parents pass on to their children and by the environment in which children are raised. This PhD thesis of Victória Trindade Pons studies a pathway that connects these factors, known as genetic nurture.
Genetic nurture refers to the influence of parents’ genes on their children through the rearing environment. For example, a parent’s genetic predisposition toward higher educational attainment may influence the home environment, expectations, or opportunities available to a child, even if the child did not inherit those specific genes. In turn, this can affect children’s school performance and their total years of education in adulthood.
Using data from the Dutch Lifelines cohort, this thesis examines genetic nurture across a wide range of traits, including education, depression and anxiety, substance use, and body mass index (BMI). To do this, a method was developed that makes it possible to estimate which parental genes were not passed on to the child, using genetic data from families. The results show clear genetic nurture effects for education, indicating that parents’ non-inherited genes play an important role in shaping their children’s educational outcomes. Smaller effects were found for smoking quantity and BMI. For depression and anxiety, alcohol use, and cannabis initiation, little to no evidence of genetic nurture was observed in adulthood.
To conclude, this work shows that the importance of genetic nurture differs across traits and is generally modest in adulthood. These findings improve our understanding of how genes and environments work together across generations.