Breastfed babies are better behaved says study

[crikeybadger]

Link here if you are interested.

It all seems a bit woolly to me. My second cousin bf her baby and now it's in prison.

Hully, it's not 'woolly' ....you are confusing 'woolly' with 'academics' sensible resistance to stating cause and effect.'

They are not saying, and cannot say, ' X causes Y'. This would be wrong, because there is no scientific method in the world that can say this about infant feeding. All you can do is to find association, correlation, links, factors and so on. These are not 'woolly' words, but accepted correct words to describe a relationship between (in this case) infant feeding and later behaviour.

It's irrelevant to this study what an individual outcome is - this study only looked at children aged 5. They may look at them again in 5 years time and see that any differences in behaviour have disappeared. Or that they have intensified. Who knows?

But the feeding background on one individual adult now in prison should have no bearing on how we read this study - it neither supports it nor refutes it. You might as well say 'my cousin formula fed her son and he has the World Prize for Politeness'...:)

Woolly as a sheep just before it's shorn.

My two aunts were ff and they are Buddhist nuns.

Um, I thought Hully's last post might be satire?

x post!

rofl at hully all the way through.

Aha!
Sorry for taking you seriously, Hully :)

And I have cheered you on all the way thro too!

Huh. I am only forgiving you in admiration of your patience and persistence.

:)

Other posters made the same points (seriously) as you made (satirically) so maybe my patient explanations will have helped them a bit?

It would be interesting if they had broken down the FF parents in terms of their reasons for not breastfeeding. I think there might be a difference between the people who just didn't want to breastfeed because they couldn't be bothered, didn't feel that sort of bond, were very young Mums who left the baby with a grandparent for a lot of the time, or who had to get back to work. No, I'm not talking about people who wanted to get back on the career ladder but people in the black economy who have cash in hand cleaning work for example. They may have children with more difficulties and it would be interesting to contrast these with the children of people who really tried to breastfeed but couldn't.

amothersplaceisinthewrong please don't see this kind of research as a criticism of mothers - it isn't at all. I bottlefed because my son was a totally uncordinated latcher, sucker and swallower - now 8 years on I know he is dyspraxic, autistic and has ADHD so the early difficulties make much more sense.

As tiktok says this has only looked at the children aged 5 and might have no bearing at all when they are 10.

And even if it does then it arms us for pushing the powers that be for much more support for women who choose to breastfeed to do so successfully.
I see women who struggle with the guilt they feel because they "couldn't do it". In actual fact what this means is the support to help them breastfeed successfully just wasn't there.

And if a mother decides NOT to breastfeed it is not the end of thre world either. I would just like us to be in a place where every mother to be has the appropriate, up to date info to make a decision with. What the mother does then should be supported regardless of whether that is breast or bottle feeding. I meet women who hate the thought of their breasts being touched and would never consider breastfeeding and I meet others who are living in overcrowded accommodation with no privacy (I am thinking here of teenagers possibly living at home with older or younger siblings).

As mothers we feel too much guilt about everything and we shouldn't, if we bottlefeed either by choice or because brreastfeeding wasn't supported then we need to give ourselves a break. Easier said than done.

Doesn't mean that research like this is meaningless though or designed to kick us when we are down.

Rebecca, yes - this would be a good qualitative study to do on a smaller no. of participants.

We already have shed loads of data on this sort of stuff - why people stop, why people don't start. We know for instance that going back to work is not a common reason at all for stopping breastfeeding until after about four to six months, and even then it's not the most common reason.

We also have a lot of data on the differences between women who start to breastfeed and then stop, and those who ff from the beginning.

The study in question does detect a dose response effect - the strongest association was seen in babies who were never breastfed.

What we don't have is a 'joined up' study using the 'why stop/why not start' data with the behaviours of five year olds.

Dilly I agree - studies like this are not really 'for' individual mothers even though they may find them of great interest and in your case, relevance. They inform government spending and public health policies.

Behaviour problems at age five are important, on a national level, even if they have disappeared by age 10 (or 8, or 15) - and of course they might not.

Early behaviour problems affect learning and school performance, and social skills. The actual 'problems' might not exist age 10, but the effects might be to hold children back academically and socially - this is worth knowing about, so we can justify support for bf and support for training HCPs, on the grounds of 'value for money' alone!

Yes, some mothers do read the studies and get angry/guilty/distressed. I don't know what to do about that - I think explaining a bit in places like mumsnet is something valuable, though, in order for mothers to see beyond the media reports.

Sorry if I'm repeating points already raised, but still not clear whether the sample group was controlled for Mothers' class, education.

Also did the study differentiate between expressed milk, breastmilk from the breast and formula?

Yes, lots of controlling for confounders.

No, they did not distinguish between bf and feeding with ebm....very few studies do.

Certainly not true for my two who were bf for well over a year, nearly 2 yrs in DS' case yet they are difficult children behaviour wise!

at not controlling for bf/ feeding with ebm.

So, this study shows that babies who are breastfed from the breast appear to have fewer behavioral problems.

Those babies have mothers who can sit down and cuddle them for extended periods.

Comparing not controlling for.

Sorry if I don't see the answer anywhere, but I don't think anyone answered my question about mixed feeding - where do mixed fed babies feature in this? Does the fact that they had breast milk mean that they fall in the breastfed babies category?

spudulika - all this argument about BFing taking up less time than FFing, I can only imagine that you were lucky enough to have a baby that was a great efficient feeder/not fussy etc. Some people find Bfing much more intensive than FFing, can we leave it at that?

Feeding ebm with a bottle (apart from occasionally) is very niche, though - very very few mothers do it. I don't think it would figure very highly even in a study of 10,000 - you wouldn't get a high enough number who did this to be able to make a sensible control.

Mixed fed babies were recorded. The differences in behaviour were seen equally in exclusively bf babies and partially bf babies - the results showed length of any bf made the difference. The longer the bf, the greater the difference.

Glad to hear that exclusively feeding EBM is rare. My experience is that 2 close relatives did it, I assumed wrongly that it was becoming widespread.

I think it is increasing - this is just my observation as a bfc and web-user where I see the occasional 'exclusively pumping' forums in the USA, mostly. But it is still very rare in the UK, does not usually last very long, and in 2000 when the babies in the Millennium Cohort were born there will have been even fewer.

Rollit: you need to get the whole paper. The programme they used to adjust was STATA SE 10.1 - is that what you mean?