'Good' Parenting Has Little Effect On Child's IQ, Florida Researcher Claims

According to criminology professor Kevin Beaver at the Florida University, positive parenting strategies like reading bedtime stories and having evening meals have little to no effect on a child’s IQ later in life. Instead, intelligence is largely a part of genetics, Beaver has argued.

Beaver examined a nationally representative sample of youth alongside a sample of adopted children from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The study included teenagers in grades 7 to 12 in the United States in 1994 and followed their lives into adulthood. They were interviewed each year until 2008, at the ages of 24 to 32.

Using the above information, Beaver then analyzed parenting behaviors and whether or not they had an effect on verbal intelligence by performing a Picture Vocabulary Test. Beaver would present a series of pictures to each person, use specific words to describe each picture and then ask the test taker to point to which picture he had described.

He found that there was little connection between “good” parenting and a child’s intelligence later in life.

“We found there was no association between parenting and the child's intelligence later in life once we accounted for genetic influences,” Beaver said. “In previous research, it looks as though parenting is having an effect on child intelligence, but in reality the parents who are more intelligent are doing these things and it is masking the genetic transformation of intelligence to their children.”

Beaver noted that the research did not include neglect or trauma and its effects on a child’s prospects. He insisted that intelligence and parenting were not related, as long as parenting fell within normal bounds.

Source: DailyMail