Can good parenting raise your child’s IQ?

It’s natural to think that things like reading bedtime stories, posting the alphabet of the wall of the nursery, and playing Mozart at bedtime should all boost your child’s intelligence.

Well, Professor Kevin Beaver, who teaches criminology at Florida State decided to test that idea.

“You have sort of two different perspectives, one is that parenting has a causal effect, the other is that different dimensions of parenting is really just a proxy for genetically how smart an individual is,” says Beaver.

Beaver says he first examined the techniques used by parents who have children with high verbal IQ’s.

But then he took the next step and examined parents who used similarly attentive parenting techniques, but who had adopted their children at an early age.

“What we found was that there was really no association at all between the way that an adoptive parent parents their adopted children and the child’s intelligence later in life,” says Beaver. “That does not mean our intelligence levels are set in stone at the moment of conception, but what it does tend to suggest is that aspects of the environment that are important for determining or influencing intelligence are not found within the way that we parent our children.”

This doesn’t mean you can just neglect your children because they’re all pre-programmed, but it does indicate that if the reason you’re reading those stories at night and debating philosophy at the dinner table is to simply boost IQ, you’re going to be disappointed.

Basically, you have to accept that your child has the brain he’s born with, and while you can make him happy and well-adjusted, you can’t make him an Einstein, or Stephen Hawking, or even Russell Wilson – if it’s not in his DNA.