Can Breastfeeding Make Your Baby Smarter?
Breastfeeding may improve children's cognitive development
Expectant mothers considering whether to nurse their newborns now have another potential benefit to consider: breastfeeding may be associated with improved academic success in first grade. In a study of 17,000 children in Belarus, those who were breastfed exclusively and for longer periods of time performed better academically than children who were not. The study, which also involved a "breastfeeding promotion intervention," is the largest to date to focus on the connection between breastfeeding and cognitive development.
Breastfeeding support may help
An additional result of the study suggests that new mothers who want to breastfeed may be more successful with support from healthcare providers. Mothers in an experimental group received encouragement and support from medical personnel to breastfeed exclusively (without supplementary liquids or foods) and to continue breastfeeding for an extended period of time. Those in a control group received no outside encouragement or support. The intervention worked: mothers in the experimental group were more likely to breastfeed exclusively at 3 months (43% compared with 6% for the control group) and had higher rates of breastfeeding for up to 12 months. On average, children in the control group breastfed for shorter periods of time, if at all.
Better school performance
What impact did those mothers' decisions about breastfeeding have on their children? Children of mothers in the experimental group showed cognitive benefits of their prolonged breastfeeding: they performed better on both standardized IQ tests and in teachers' ratings of their academic performance than children who were breastfed less. At 6% years, children in both groups were given a standardized IQ test with four subtests: vocabulary, similarities, block designs, and matrixes. On each of the subtests, and in terms of overall intelligence, children of mothers in the experimental group, who were breastfed, outperformed children in the control group. The breastfed children also outperformed their peers in the control group in teacher ratings of their academic performance in reading, writing, mathematics, and other subjects, and the breastfed children even scored slightly higher (by 7.5 points) in the verbal section of an IQ test.
Researchers cannot yet explain why breastfeeding had this effect-whether there is an ingredient in mother's milk that improves intellectual function, or whether the close physical, social, and verbal interactions inherent in breastfeeding foster cognitive development. It may be that how a baby is fed and nurtured, as well as what a baby is fed, influences later academic performance.
Whatever the explanation, the results of this study suggest that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding may improve children's cognitive development.
Source: Archives of General Psychiatry 65 (2008): 578-84.
https://www.theparentreview.com/tprlibrary/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=61
Alhamdulillah.
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