Intergenerational effects of parental educational attainment on parenting and childhood educational outcomes: Evidence from MoBa using within-family Mendelian randomization

The intergenerational transmission of educational attainment from parents to their children is one of the most important and studied relationships in social science. Longitudinal studies have found strong associations between parents’ and their children’s educational outcomes, which could be due to the effects of parents. Here we provide new evidence about whether parents’ educational attainment affects their parenting behaviours and children’s early educational outcomes using within-family Mendelian randomization and data from 40,879 genotyped parent-child trios from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort (MoBa) study. We found evidence suggesting that parents’ educational attainment affects their children’s educational outcomes from age 5 to 14. More studies are needed to provide more samples of parent-child trios and assess the potential consequences of selection bias and grandparental effects.