Academic achievement is partly heritable and highly polygenic. However, genetic effects on academic achievement are not independent of environmental processes. We investigated whether aspects of the family environment mediated genetic effects on academic achievement across development. Our sample included 5151 children who participated in the Twins Early Development Study, as well as their parents and teachers. Data on academic achievement and family environments (parenting, home environments, and geocoded indices of neighbourhood characteristics) were available at ages 7, 9, 12 and 16. We computed educational attainment polygenic scores (PGS) and further separated genetic effects into cognitive and noncognitive PGS. Three core findings emerged. First, aspects of the family environment, but not the wider neighbourhood context, consistently mediated the PGS effects on achievement across development—accounting for up to 34.3% of the total effect. Family characteristics mattered beyond socio-economic status. Second, family environments were more robustly linked to noncognitive PGS effects on academic achievement than cognitive PGS effects. Third, when we investigated whether environmental mediation effects could also be observed when considering differences between siblings, adjusting for family fixed effects, we found that environmental mediation was nearly exclusively observed between families. This is consistent with the proposition that family environmental contexts contribute to academic development via passive gene-environment correlation processes or genetic nurture. Our results show how parents tend to shape environments that foster their children’s academic development partly based on their own genetic disposition, particularly towards noncognitive skills, rather than responding to each child’s genetic disposition.

学术成就部​​分是可遗传的并且是高度多基因的。然而，遗传对学业成绩的影响并不独立于环境过程。我们调查了家庭环境的各个方面是否介导了遗传对整个发展过程中学业成绩的影响。我们的样本包括 5151 名参与双胞胎早期发展研究的儿童，以及他们的父母和老师。我们提供了 7、9、12 和 16 岁的学业成绩和家庭环境（养育方式、家庭环境和社区特征的地理编码指数）的数据。我们计算了教育程度多基因分数 (PGS)，并进一步将遗传影响分为认知和非认知PGS。出现了三个核心发现。首先，家庭环境的各个方面，而不是更广泛的邻里环境，始终调节 PGS 对发展成就的影响——占总影响的 34.3%。家庭特征的重要性超出了社会经济地位。其次，家庭环境与非认知性 PGS 对学业成绩的影响比认知性 PGS 影响更为密切。第三，当我们调查在考虑兄弟姐妹之间的差异并调整家庭固定效应时是否也可以观察到环境中介效应时，我们发现环境中介效应几乎完全在家庭之间观察到。这与家庭环境背景通过被动基因-环境关联过程或遗传培育有助于学术发展的主张是一致的。 我们的研究结果表明，父母往往会根据自己的遗传倾向，尤其是非认知技能，来塑造促进孩子学业发展的环境，而不是根据每个孩子的遗传倾向做出反应。