Breastfed Children Do Better at School, Study Suggests

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Breastfed Children Do Better at School, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2011) — Researchers have shown that breastfeeding

causes children to do better at school. The research conducted by Oxford

University and the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Essex University,

found that as little as four weeks of breastfeeding for a newborn baby has a

significant effect on brain development, which persists until the child is at

least 14 years old.

See Also:

Health & Medicine

* Infant's Health

* Breastfeeding

* Children's Health

Mind & Brain

* Child Development

* Child Psychology

* Intelligence

Reference

* Maternal bond

* Colostrum

* Baby colic

* Infant

The researchers matched each breastfed baby with one or more babies who were not

breastfed, but who were similar in all other respects. Test scores in reading,

writing and mathematics for the children at ages five, seven, 11 and 14 revealed

a statistically significant difference between those who had been breastfed as

compared with those who had not.

The research is published in a working paper 'The Effect of Breastfeeding on

Children's Cognitive Development', which has yet to be peer reviewed.

Breastfeeding is more likely to be practiced by mothers who are of higher social

class with a higher IQ. The researchers needed to demonstrate whether the

relationship between breastfeeding and brain development was caused by the

breastfeeding alone, or whether it was because mothers who breastfeed are likely

to have more successful children anyway.

They used a rich dataset from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and

Children, which covers 12,000 children born in the early 1990s in the Bristol

area. Babies were matched on a huge range of characteristics, including: their

sex, gestational age, birth weight, their mother's age and marital status,

parents' job status and education, and their home environment. Crucially, the

researchers also used the parents' attitudes to breastfeeding as measured before

birth.

Co-author Dr Almudena Sevilla-Sanz, from the Department of Economics and the

Centre for Time Use Research at Oxford University, said: 'Comparing the test

scores of groups of children matched in this way, we are effectively estimating

the causal effect of breastfeeding. We find that breastfeeding does have a

causal effect on children's cognitive outcomes. The difference is statistically

significant across English, maths and science scores, and persists into

secondary school. Indeed, there is some evidence that the effect tends to grow

over time.