Breastfeeding produces not only healthier babies but also brighter children, according to a new study from ISER. As little as four weeks of breastfeeding for a new-born infant has a “positive and significant effect” on brain development, the research finds, right up to secondary school and beyond.
Children who had been breastfed consistently outperformed their formula-fed peers at ages five, seven, 11 and 14 in tests of reading, writing and mathematics, according to the ISER Working Paper, The effect of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive development produced by Maria Iacovou at ISER and Almudena Sevilla from the University of Oxford.
The NHS already recommends that babies should be breastfed rather than given formula for their first six months, but Britain has one of the world’s lowest rates of breastfeeding. Only 35% of UK infants are exclusively breastfed at one week old, 21% at six weeks, 7% at four months and just 3% at six months.
Maria Iacovou explained that while the health benefits of breast milk were widely known and understood, it had been less clear to what extent there were benefits for cognitive development. She said:
“The issue was that while it looked as though breast feeding did have an impact on cognitive development, no one knew if that was just because the type of mother more likely to breastfeed in the first place was more likely to nurture brighter children, or whether there was a true causal link,” she said.
The ISER study – a working paper that will be peer-reviewed at a later date – compared breastmilk-fed children with formula-fed “twins”, children who were equivalent in all other observable respects.
“We did find there is a link between breast milk and cognitive development. Breast milk has well-known health benefits and now we can say there are clear benefits for children’s brains as well.”
Despite the findings, she said, she still supported mothers who decided for whatever reason that breastfeeding wasn’t for them.
“It wasn’t my intention to make any mother feel guilty. All this talk about bringing up children would sometimes seem to have us think that the child is the only thing that matters. Mothers are people too and have feelings and if you don’t want to breastfeed your baby, well, luckily in this country you are not going to cause it harm. They would just do a little bit less well. I think we have a lot of challenges to change our culture and attitudes to breastfeeding but it’s likely to happen through a gradual process of normalisation. Don’t pressurise women who don’t want to breastfeed but we should start focusing more on those women who do want to and try to help them pull it off and make it more normal for everyone.”
The research, which is part of a wide-ranging Breastfeeding research project at ISER, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, was welcomed by the Royal College of Midwives which said that, while it was interesting and further proof of the benefits of breastfeeding, there were several reasons behind the popularity of bottle-feeding infants in the UK and that the UK had a long way to go in normalising breastfeeding in the way other countries had done.
- Read the research – The effect of breastfeeding on children’s cognitive development
- Read what the Observer’s Tracy McVeigh writes about the research Breastfeeding aids child brain development, study finds