Using DNA to predict children's developmental differences

Children's differences in early life development have pervasive, long-term influence on their later life outcomes, such as education, health, and well-being. A major source of children's developmental differences is their family background, which includes the rearing environments that they grow up in and the DNA differences that children inherit from their parents. My recent studies sought to disentangle the interplay between rearing environments and DNA differences, using polygenic scores to identity gene-environment interactions (GxE) in children's cognitive and social-emotional development. Data came from large-scale, longitudinal cohort studies from the UK. I will review the findings from this work, which overall suggests that GxE effects are difficult to detect with existing methods and approaches.