Feeding on demand = 'higher IQ'

[coffeeaddict]

Another weekend, another piece of research to send me into a tizzy. I have always veered towards feed on demand, while gently trying to get the baby into a routine by a few months old.

But I am now on number 5. I can't let her sleep in till whenever she wants. She has to be up with the family and fed at 7, to get the show on the road.

Also: when she was little she was very sleepy and we had to wake her up for feeds. We used to set alarms in the night. So we had to impose some sort of routine for her. She didn't demand enough, that was her problem!

Of course now having seen the research at the weekend I am freaking out and thinking 'I've done the wrong thing' while DH tells me it's all a load of bollocks. NOt even sure what the researchers mean by 'a routine'.

It's all very well. You can do what you like with your first baby. Once you have a few, it's impossible to be so 'go with the flow'. So if this is right, are last-borns inevitable going to have a lower IQ???

PS apologies if there is already a thread on this, couldn't find it.

But you did feed on demand i.e when your baby asked for it. You just offered her feeds on top of her demand feeds ??

Surely the research refers to with holding feeds (to four hourly routine for example) rather than adding extra ones in.

I suspect that what they are saying is that babies who are forced to wait ages to be fed (because it's not 'time' yet) suffer a wee bit in terms of IQ. Which is logical really.

Ah, but what if you feed formula on demand?

Really, please don't worry about it. There will be more research along to show that if we didn't clothe them in satin we've damaged their hair follicles next week...

Hee hee GetAGrip.

Presumably FF on demand = + 4 or 5 points for demand feeding while BF on demand = + 4 of 5 points for BF and + 4 or 5 points for demand feeding.

TBH the base IQ would have to be pretty low for either to make an actual difference.

I read that over the weekend. Sounds to me like you have fed on demand. Just tweaked the circumstances a little. Like the research suggest, the difference in IQ isn't going to be from bottom to top class, just 4 or 5 points. Please don't worry

I laughed a little as i saw it as a bit of a dig at Gina Ford who proclaims we should feed every 3 to 4 hours (bf or ff) (which ime and imo is bollocks) - this research just adds something else for parents to consider and make up their own mind if they choose baby led or mother led feeding.

I like that my dd chooses when and how much to feed (bf) but I only have her to look after so i can imagine it being difficult for mums with more than one child, work and other commitments like caring for elderly parents as well.

Stop worrying!

In various tests down the years I have scored exceptionally high in IQ . I also know for a fact that my DM fed me on a strictly routine basis as it was the fashion at the time (1960's). IQ is affected by so many factors including genetics, environment and training that it is ridiculous to take one element in isolation and point to that as 'thereason'. As ever there is a big difference between 'causation' and 'correlation'. Ignore.

Love Mumsnet. Instant reassuring response. Thank you! :)

A link to its coverage on the guardian is here. And coffeeaddict you are feeding on demand. I've seen gina ford mums in action. They ignore their babies cry and keep shuffling the dummy back in, when their mums are doing nothing more than having a coffee with other mums. It's very very sad to watch. If you feed before you go out, because you think they might get hungry while you are doing a school run, you are being sensitive to the baby's needs. It's withholding feeds, and letting the baby cry a lot that the article seems to be saying to cause the lower IQ.

Oh and I saw the coverage of this on breakfast this morning. Who's that parenting expert they have? I got so angry when she said all you need to feed on demand is a few weeks. And by 4-5 weeks all 3 of her kids were on a schedule and sleep through 8 hours a night. Precisly the kind of pressure we shouldn't be giving to new mums.

"In various tests down the years I have scored exceptionally high in IQ .

But clearly not high enough to have cottoned on to the fact that this research and all the rest on breastfeeding and intelligence only suggests an IQ difference in bf babies of up to 6 points, which would make it imperceptible to the individual and have no measurable bearing on educational attainment, except that which might show up at a population with research involving many thousands of people.

Personally I think those who feed on demand may by their nature be more responsive and more flexible than those who feed to a strict routine. Flexibility and responsiveness are both very important qualities in a parent.

However, I also think it's not unreasonable to speculate that nutrition for the first six months of life may have some impact on brain development. Breastmilk and formula are the sole source of nutrition for this period of incredibly fast growth, and they are not identical or even particularly similar, except in a very crude sense in terms of the proportion of fats, proteins and sugars that they contain.

"except that which might show up at a population level, and even then it would only make a very minimal difference"

Re: 6 IQ points won't make a difference - google 'average IQ by occupation'

here

At a population level the millions of IQ points lost by a lack of breastfeeding over the years in the UK may well have made a difference to the overall wealth of the nation. Impossible to measure though!

Agree with cogito that it's probably, as usual, a correlation/ causation thing.

ie. not the same thing - just because two things are found together doesn't mean one is cause of t'other.

I reckon bright parents feed their babies on demand other things being equal more often than dim ones.

Did they even look at the intelligence of the mother ? Even if they did, what about all the other co-existing factors ?

More a marker for good environment than a causative factor I'd say.

People are always obsessed with diet and forget important environmental factors including the vital quality of parental interaction with baby.

(Just look at Mums looking around a Nursery and more emphasis will be given to what baby will be having for lunch than on who will be caring for her. )

Onelittlebaby you're talking rubbish.

I'm a Gina mum of 3.The beauty of Gina is they rarely cry as they get into a routine and simply don't ever get to the frantic starving hungry stage as they're fed at regular times-errrr that is the whole point.

The whole thing sounds like tosh.I have twins,1 always had to wait for the other so are all twins lower IQ,what about babies in nurseries?

I'm a 60s baby of which most were in routines sooooo were all of us born in 60s and 70s not as able?And why exactly would waiting for a few minutes effect IQ,I mean seriously come on.

Honestly the rubbish they bring out. Ignore,ignore,ignore......

SchoolsNightmare - they did try in the study to separate out the effects of 'type of mother' from 'type of feeding', i.e.looking at the group who tried but failed to feed to schedule - despite being similar in social/economic terms to the schedule group, they had outcomes closer to those of the on-demand group.

It is interesting, but I think I'd need to know more about exactly what they measured and what the results were - e.g. what the 'schedule' generally was and did it include extreme cases?

I'll try to get hold of the actual research paper if I can, and have a look...

I did think the point of 'schedule' feeding was about feeding regularly so that the baby never gets to the stage of needing to 'demand' food - but that's not necessarily how everyone does it of course, and the study may be conflating that with parents who are leaving their babies to cry with hunger because it isn't convenient to feed them yet. Which is a very different thing IMO.

More information needed!

I would also wonder if they're making a false assumption that both the failed-schedule and the schedule groups are the same 'type of mother' - not necessarily the case, as maybe some of the former group 'failed' as they found they actually weren't that 'type' after all. Maybe they were in fact more like the on-demand type all along?

MrsHeffley and Ephiny I actually have tried following Gina Ford. Gina doesn't have you feed nearly enough for my DD. I remember from a very young age, maybe 1-2 months, there is a huge 4 hour gap between the 10am feed and the 2pm feed. All the other feeds are also around 3 hours intervals. My DD was demanding around every 1-2 hours during the day at that point. (She's actually a great night sleeper, sleeping through from 11-12 weeks). I just couldn't see how I could stretch it out to get to a 3, let alone the mega 4 hour gap midday.

And there was one mum in my group who's doing Gina, and I did ask her how she did it. She told me to use a dummy and don't feed until the next scheduled time. It's from then that I noticed she does let her baby cry it out. However, hers was ff and I'm bf, so maybe it's not as cruel if you are simply following the manufacturer's feeding amounts.

Ephiny I know they say the schedule group tend to be less educated, single etc etc. I read Gina and Tracey Hogg because I wanted to do the 'right' thing. I probably did fail as I'm not that 'type', and I found it much easier to just do it on demand.

OK so I found the paper, this is what they did:

"The variable of interest in this study is whether children were fed
according to a schedule. When babies were 4 weeks old, mothers
were asked: ?Is your baby fed (either by breast or bottle) on a
regular schedule (e.g. every 4 hours)?? Mothers were asked to
reply ?yes, always? (7.2%); ?yes, try to? (23.4%) or ?no, fed on
demand? (69.4%)"

This seems a little dodgy to me, as there's no clear definition of what a 'regular schedule' is, it's just up to the mother's interpretation (and we've seen on here already that it's not always simple, as in the OPs case where she thought she fed on-schedule but others argue that what she was doing is feeding on-demand). And surely the 'e.g. every 4 hours' thing is a very leading question, perhaps making women feel that if they feed more often it can't be a 'proper' schedule. And 'try to' is quite a woolly category - surely there's a lot of variation in how hard you try and how well you succeed?

These kinds of self-reported results are always a bit dubious anyway, especially when there's no validation of them, people tend to say what they think they should be doing, or what they're kidding themselves that they are doing (compare the studies where people are asked what they eat in a day).

I'm not saying the results are wrong or not interesting, and I'm not arguing for or against either type of feeding. But I think we really need to be wary about drawing any definite conclusion from these results (even the lead researcher herself advises caution), and I don't think anyone should be changing a routine that works for them and their baby (or feeling bad about the way they did things) just on this basis.

This article is going to have lots of people posting on parenting forums worried. You going to get extremes of anecdotes from "I was only given two bottles of lard 12 hours apart and I have an IQ of a squilliion" to "my Mum took me bungee jumping with her in case I wanted a feed at the time and I'm thick as pig shit, me"

The real truth is you are on your 5th child, quite frankly in terms of hours of actual child rearing experience you are waaaaaaaay more of an expert than some hack who found a couple of interesting statistics on the internet and decided to make them into an article.

Seriously, stop worrying about how you feed your dcs. Unless one of them's grown a third head or something as a result of how you've fed them you're probably doing ok.

Surely all mothers should be doing what suits them and their family not what some journalist or dubious bit of research says.

Different babies,different mothers-one size does not suit all.

How do you know it's 'dubious'? Have you read the full study and the responses to it by academics with expertise in the fields of infant feeding and child development?

As for mothers doing 'what suits them and the family', the instinctive response to this is to say 'of course!'. But there is always a thought for me that as babies are voiceless, their best interests as regards feeding tend to be disregarded if they conflict with what adults find more convenient or socially and emotionally comfortable.

Should add - this is NOT the first study which finds higher IQ in breastfeed babies. It's just unusual that it also examines the issue of feeding to schedule.