To what extent can parenting affect a child's future intelligence level?
This is a follow up on What can I do to a 6-month-old child so she ends up smart and has a high IQ?. A comment left by @chasly mentions that:
High IQ is not something that can be trained. You can train people to do well in IQ tests by giving them practice but their actual IQ will depend on genetics. High IQ does not correlate with happiness. "Doing" something to your child sounds more like torture than a benefit.
What is current scientific consensus on how well parents can affect their future child's intelligence? Is there a significant correlation between parenting efforts and outcomes, or does intelligence primarily depend on one's genetics and peers of the same age?
Please note that I'm only interested in scientific research rather than personal anecdotes.
Measures of "intelligence" that I'm primarily interested in, from best to worst: income percentile, maximum attained education level, GPA scores, IQ tests.
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Without directly referencing a number of journal articles, you could check out The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. In the book he addresses the modern notion (and misconception) that every person is a 'blank slate' that can be molded how we like. I believe this book will offer up to date info to address this question.
What he specifically says about parenting (and you can do some Googling on this) is that life outcomes for children largely depend on genetics and characteristics that are intrinsic to your child. In other words, parents have much less of an impact on their children than they usually believe.
So to directly answer the question, you can't really affect your child's innate intelligence, but you can affect the things they know. As a parent your job is to teach your children how to become independent adults, not affect who they are.
This idea is becoming more common and also appears in The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik. That is - our job as parents is to help our children become who they were meant to become, not turn them into something that they are not.
To some that we have minimal impact on who our children are might seem like a negative thing, but in reality it relieves some of the pressure in parenting and allows us to just enjoy the development of our children.
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