Children are not born smart in much the same way that children are not born strong. Of course, some children are born with more potential smartness, just like some children are born with more potential strength. But they still need the environment to reach their full potential. There are some outliers who become really smart despite the lack of help from their environment, but probably they would have become even smarter in a helpful environment.
A better analogy is height. Given some minimal level of nutrition, a child's adult height can be extrapolated quite accurately from their parents' genomes. However, if a child grows up in abject poverty, all bets are off. See Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption [1] for details.
I also found the book 'Selfish reasons to have more kids' interesting on this topic. It uses twin studies to suggest that although parenting does have an effect in the short term, in the long term genetic factors are dominant as long as the child is raised outside abject poverty.
The conclusion of the book is: provide a healthy environment, but don't agonize over violin lessons and other 'enriching' activities.
That said, I went and bought another book with advice on how to talk to your child to stimulate language development ('look who's talking') and we read to him a lot. So, I believe the twin studies in theory, but not in practice.
Finally, on this general topic, 'how children succeed' points out that character traits like grit (willingness to keep trying something hard and unpleasant) and conscientiousness (desire to do the right thing) are more important than intellect in success, beyond some modest intellect baseline. I suspect my son is plenty smart, but what really interests me is trying to foster grit and conscientiousness.
Another trait that's important for success in life is deferred gratification, or the ability to give up a small immediate reward for a larger reward in the future. That trait, when measured in children, is correlated with all sorts of positive things later in life, including academic success and physical health.
The study I assume you are basing your statement that '[delayed gratification] when measured in children, is correlated with all sorts of positive things' has largely been debunked. When the poverty level of the children tested is factored out, the effect disappears.
It seems what is really being shown is the rational basis in children to discount promises made by adults for future rewards, when in their experience adults had been unable or unwilling to deliver on promises made.
I don't think either of those two links refute the idea that "delayed gratification when measured in children, is correlated with all sorts of positive things".
From The Daily Beast article: "Eigsti does not feel her data disproves Mischel—he was actually a co-author on her paper, and she thinks her work is consistent."
The Priconomics article says: "The original marshmallow experiment concluded that the children's ability to wait for a second treat indicated an innate ability to exhibit self control". But nothing I've read indicates that Mischel believed the ability to delay gratification was innate. In fact, most of his previous research indicated that such an ability was strongly influenced by environmental factors.
I have the exact same concern. While my kid is only 1.5 years old and as such I don't consider him smart, dumb or anything in between, the thing in the next years I would like to teach him most is exactly what you mention, grit and conscientiousness. This has been on my mind since he was born.
If you want to talk about or discuss some ideas, you can reach me at my email (on profile)
However we barely understand the genetic factors. In humans it can be pretty difficult to control the environment. And then we assume we can understand the genetics of intelligence, when we barely understand either genetics or intelligence itself.
You can keep saying stuff like that, but I hope you're not using it as a pretext for ignoring the latest scientific developments.
Have you heard of GWAS? They've had some major breakthroughs over the past few years, and have recently had some interesting results with regard to educational attainment. From Science:
