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This is a follow up on What can I do to a 6-month-old child so she ends up smart and has a high IQ?. A comment left by @chasly mentions that:

High IQ is not something that can be trained. You can train people to do well in IQ tests by giving them practice but their actual IQ will depend on genetics. High IQ does not correlate with happiness. "Doing" something to your child sounds more like torture than a benefit.

What is current scientific consensus on how well parents can affect their future child's intelligence? Is there a significant correlation between parenting efforts and outcomes, or does intelligence primarily depend on one's genetics and peers of the same age? Please note that I'm only interested in scientific research rather than personal anecdotes.

Measures of "intelligence" that I'm primarily interested in, from best to worst: income percentile, maximum attained education level, GPA scores, IQ tests.

JonathanReez
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    Is there a significant correlation between parenting efforts and outcomes How do you measure "outcome" here? Are you describing IQ tests specifically, or general "success in life" outcomes, or education, or something else? – Joe Nov 19 '20 at 22:03
  • @Joe I'd define outcome as the child's percentile of income as an adult. In other words, can parents reliably ensure that their child gets into the top 10% of all earners in their country? If such research is not available, I'd settle for academic scores or IQ tests. – JonathanReez Nov 19 '20 at 22:13
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    @Jonathan: do you consider giving birth to a child whilst enjoying high socioeconomic status to be a "parenting effort"? –  Nov 19 '20 at 22:19
  • @dxh no, but presumably well off parents can afford to invest more resources into parenting due to having more money, at least on average – JonathanReez Nov 19 '20 at 22:26
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    Percentile of income? That's a very uninteresting question - your income percentile is nearly entirely determined by your parent's income and background. Intelligence is not correlated nearly at all with income. – Joe Nov 19 '20 at 22:43
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    @Joe people's kids can be richer or poorer than their parents. For an extreme example see Jeff Bezos. – JonathanReez Nov 19 '20 at 22:49
  • @JonathanReez Sure, social mobility is not zero. But by far, the most significant factor in determining your future income level (as a child) is your parent's socioeconomic status, far more than any childhood intervention would show. If that's what you want to see in answers, then be my guest - but it's not particularly related to "intelligence", which has very little to do with life outcomes. Executive function is much more highly correlated with income, for example. – Joe Nov 19 '20 at 22:56
  • @Joe the answer might just we'll be "parenting has nothing to do with intelligence/income", which I'll accept too if justified by research – JonathanReez Nov 19 '20 at 22:57
  • @Jonathan: but that's an anecdote, and you're asking for data! In general socioeconomic status is an incredibly strong predictor to most metrics of success. That will be a massive confounder to control for. –  Nov 19 '20 at 22:58
  • @JonathanReez The problem is that you're oversimplifying there. I'm saying that intelligence has relatively little to do with income, not that parenting has nothing to do with intelligence. If that's the answer, then what - are you going to go back to the other thread and hold this as proof that someone's wrong? You'd be misusing data, then. – Joe Nov 19 '20 at 23:01
  • @Joe my own parents were quite poor (almost everyone was in the Soviet Union) and I went to a horrible (by US standards) high school that barely had enough funds to paint their walls every year, let alone get quality equipment for students. So I'm biased towards the idea that parents can have a large influence. But that's just an anecdote. I'm not here to prove anything to that other guy, but rather curious in general. – JonathanReez Nov 19 '20 at 23:21
  • That's fine - then I would edit the question to include your particular criteria, rather than having it in comments. – Joe Nov 19 '20 at 23:34
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    I made the cited comment. Note that I don't equate IQ with education. A very loose metaphor would be that IQ is the size of the receptacle and education is what you put into it. An expensively taught student could have a low IQ and someone with barely any education could have a high IQ. Parent input is important. – chasly - supports Monica Nov 20 '20 at 01:08
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    @Joe - "...income ...is nearly entirely determined by your parent's income and background." Wealth is familial, but "income" is much more variable. My family was dirt poor; my ex's solidly middle class. Our income far exceeded our backgrounds. Most of my (state U) med school classmates were middle class, yet income put them higher. Of my kids (all finished w/ education), one is in the top 5%, while one is in the bottom 25%. We are neither the rule, nor (by far) the exception. – anongoodnurse Nov 20 '20 at 03:04
  • You're going to get strong opinions and few verifiable facts, because of the variety of your parameters and the different definitions of intelligence and success. Also, alas, social science (e.g. sociology) is much "softer" than hard science (e.g. physics), affecting how scientific (your emphasis) the answers will be. "can parents reliably ensure that their child gets into the top 10% of all earners in their country?" No. (Opinion!) See my comment above. – anongoodnurse Nov 20 '20 at 03:08
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    @JonathanReez "can parenting affect intelligence?" is a completely different question than "can parenting affect future income levels?" The answer to each could easily be different. Maybe you're really asking if parenting can affect a child's chance of future success? And your other thread is maybe asking how best to do that? – Kat Nov 21 '20 at 05:35

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Without directly referencing a number of journal articles, you could check out The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. In the book he addresses the modern notion (and misconception) that every person is a 'blank slate' that can be molded how we like. I believe this book will offer up to date info to address this question.

What he specifically says about parenting (and you can do some Googling on this) is that life outcomes for children largely depend on genetics and characteristics that are intrinsic to your child. In other words, parents have much less of an impact on their children than they usually believe.

So to directly answer the question, you can't really affect your child's innate intelligence, but you can affect the things they know. As a parent your job is to teach your children how to become independent adults, not affect who they are.

This idea is becoming more common and also appears in The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik. That is - our job as parents is to help our children become who they were meant to become, not turn them into something that they are not.

To some that we have minimal impact on who our children are might seem like a negative thing, but in reality it relieves some of the pressure in parenting and allows us to just enjoy the development of our children.

Cdn_Dev
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    It would be useful to reference the data Pinker uses in his book to justify his claims. Likewise for Gopnik. Presumably it should be in scientific journals. – JonathanReez Nov 23 '20 at 16:12
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    This is why this particular section of Stack is such a mess and why I don't participate anymore - I don't have time to parse through Google Scholar to provide a phenomenal answer on the internet, and yet I get downvoted for providing a thoughtful, good answer that points out two professionals who have done considerable research on the subject. – Cdn_Dev Nov 23 '20 at 18:17
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    Downvoting for that reason would be (or is) absurd. Even in academic writing it's common to cite a reference as a gateway to other more detailed references. Thank you for the effort put into a thoughtful answer. – CynicallyNaive Nov 23 '20 at 18:36