Estimating effects of parents' cognitive and non-cognitive skills on offspring education using polygenic scores.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 35999215.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-022-32003-x and PMC identifier 9399113.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Understanding how parents' cognitive and non-cognitive skills influence offspring education is essential for educational, family and economic policy. We use genetics (GWAS-by-subtraction) to assess a latent, broad non-cognitive skills dimension. To index parental effects controlling for genetic transmission, we estimate indirect parental genetic effects of polygenic scores on childhood and adulthood educational outcomes, using siblings (N = 47,459), adoptees (N = 6407), and parent-offspring trios (N = 2534) in three UK and Dutch cohorts. We find that parental cognitive and non-cognitive skills affect offspring education through their environment: on average across cohorts and designs, indirect genetic effects explain 36-40% of population polygenic score associations. However, indirect genetic effects are lower for achievement in the Dutch cohort, and for the adoption design. We identify potential causes of higher sibling- and trio-based estimates: prenatal indirect genetic effects, population stratification, and assortative mating. Our phenotype-agnostic, genetically sensitive approach has established overall environmental effects of parents' skills, facilitating future mechanistic work.
Medical subject headings
- Multifactorial Inheritance
- Siblings