A long literature in psychology and sociology attempts to measure the relative contributions of “nurture” and “nature” to individuals’ life outcomes. Nature is characterized as principally consisting of a person’s genetic makeup, while nurture is treated as the social environment in which a person is born and raised, which includes parental investment in their children’s development. The relative emphasis on nurture or nature in scholarly argumentation is largely the product of disciplinary differences; increasingly, multidisciplinary work, spanning the social, biological and psychological sciences, emphasizes their complex interaction in producing outcomes. In this project, we hope to contribute to this burgeoning multidisciplinary endeavor by broadening the scope of how scientists conceive “nature” and “nurture”.

We plan to do this in two ways. First, we plan to examine the extent to which the genetic material a child receives at birth is, in fact, related to prenatal “nurture”, which includes the health, behaviors and the environment of the parents prior to, and over the course of the pregnancy. Although offspring receive exactly 50% of their genes from each parent, little is known about the survival of the fertilized egg. Depending on the genetic material of the zygote – the fertilized egg – the womb environment of the mother, or the sperm quality of the father, genetically different zygotes may survive past their initial fertilization. We can use a number of different factors, such as parental age and other stress factors, all of which are thought to result in harsher womb conditions, to study how zygote genetic makeup interacts with prenatal environment to predict zygote survival till birth. This would be evidence of “nurture before birth”, and would affect the distribution of “natures” in the population, complicating the dichotomy of nurture versus nature arguments in human development and life outcomes.

Second, we hope to compare prenatal environmental effects, if established by the first analyses, with the more traditional measures of the social environment in childhood development. In this stage of the research too, we hope to complicate how nurture and nature are defined. We will empirically examine the idea that parental choices are independent of their own genes. Studies have shown that the genes of parents, even when not transmitted to the offspring, have an effect on their outcomes later in life. The main pathway through which these un-transmitted genes affect children’s outcomes is via parental “nurturing practices”, which may or may not be influenced by parents’ genes. Further, a nurturing parent confronts a child, who has his or her own nature, personality and behavior, allowing for a possible interaction between a parents’ genes and nurturing behavior and a child’s genotype. Conceiving of parental behaviors as inelastic to and independent from the child’s own genetically-influenced interests, behaviors, and tendencies has been challenged by developmental psychologists. Parents may well adapt their parenting practices in response to children's interests and behaviors. For example, the extent to which a parent can adopt nurturing practices to a child’s antisocial behavior may be constrained by their genotype. We will examine the complex interactions in relation to educational outcomes of the child and cognitively stimulating parenting, since educational outcomes are of immense sociological interest, and they are among the most well-measured outcomes. We specifically consider (1) whether children's genetic makeup affects socio-emotional and cognitive skills, (2) whether children's genetic makeup evokes cognitively stimulating parenting, and (3) whether cognitively stimulating parenting moderates the relationship between children's genetic makeup and socio-emotional and cognitive skills.