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.

Also, IQ isn't everything. I completely freaked out when I saw the report in only the way that a hormonal mother juggling 5 kids can... (Thank you all for calming me down!)

Then it occurred to me that a human's well-being and potential depends on a lot more than IQ. I am really seeing that with my teenagers. There is emotional intelligence. There is ability to defer gratification and see consequences. It is a massive complex picture, and some of the brightest people I know are also the most messed up and unsuccessful in life, so go figure.

But Cory - the research did try to control for social class and education.

My personal take on all this is that instead of trying our best to trivialise the dozens of ways in which bf benefits babies, we should be acknowledging that this is the cheapest and simplest ways to promote the health and development of babies and children across a range of measures, and be doing our utmost as a society to protect it.

First step - stop allowing such widespread advertising of follow on milk, particularly as all the research into developmental benefits of bf points to a dose related effect, ie the longer a child is bf the more benefits there are for them.

Coffee - wanted to add, there was some interesting research a couple of years back into how bf benefits children's emotional and social development. Google breastfeeding and telethon institute Australia. You may be able to find it. (can't do links on phone).

Also shagmund with the advertising of "follow-on" milk eg. on television you couldn't say this would only have an effect on promoting follow-on milk - I'm sure the images used also promote FF in general - images of aspirational women and families and happy babies in beautiful settings being fed formula from bottles. It's just a loop hole really that it is allegedly "follow-on" milk. Everyone knows they also provide formula for those under 6 months, where it is in direct competition with breast-feeding. Perhaps NCT/ La Leche etc could get together and actually have an advert for breast-feeding. That would be good, but I don't know if it's just prohibitively expensive ?

In the spirit of anecdote meaning ice-cold iron-hard scientific fact, let me tell you that I am the youngest of 5, and that my mother's family routine grew ever more strict until my arrival, and that my older siblings increase in intelligence until you finally get to me, a certified genius, according to several plainly bullshit IQ tests.

HTH

Yay! :)

juggling the problem is that all these good a d simple things in life aren't products with a huge profit margin. Therefore it simply can't compete in the game advertising. Things like bf, water, home cooked meals, fruit and veg.

Sure one little baby - but maybe the government needs to recognise this more and step in with some advertising or public information around these topics. Breastfeeding has so many benefits including possibly in relationship to later obesity for the child, if children and adults drank more water there would be less tooth extractions in childhood and other dental problems. and we are already seeing some great, simple 5 -a -day adverts, and we all know how many health problems that can counter alongside good home cooked food !
I think a little advertising could be money well spent. But the government/ our society always seems reluctant to spend much on prevention. I truly don't understand why !

juggling I can't believe how many babies and toddlers are given fruit shoot. What's wrong with a sippy cup of water.

"I've seen gina ford mums in action. They ignore their babies cry..."

I was and am a GF mum, and NOWHERE does she suggest leaving your hungry baby to cry, but instead encourages feeding on a schedule while feeding the baby 'early' if the baby needs it, much the same as the OP does anyway.

I am pretty sure GF endorses Ferber? Don't want to get into it, though.

The study's are talking about average IQ increases of 4-5 points; ffs, the error margins on IQ tests are larger than 5.

In the ideal world we'd all have trouble free pregnancies & perfect vaginal births on 3 September & babies who slept like dreams (no need to even read GF), breastfeed until 13+ months when baby & mother would both feel simultaneously like quitting. Our LOs would hit all their milestones exactly on time, read Shakespeare (enthusiastically) by 7yo and get a slew of A*s at GCSE.

But nobody gets all that, ok? You get what you're given & you make the most of it. Nothing to feel guilty about as long as you tried your best at the time.

Oh come on - the vast majority of women with NO EDUCATION the world over since the dawn of time have managed to raise their babies to weaning age on breastmilk alone. It's hardly an 'ideal'. It's just a normal biological function that most people succeed in without too much trouble, if they grow up in a culture where breastfeeding is normal and expected.

It shows how pitifully fucked up we are about the whole subject that someone is prepared to compare normal breastfeeding with reading Shakespeare at the age of 7.

IQ really isn't the be-all and end-all, and most of the things that people need for successful lives - empathy, impulse control, perseverance, are learned and not innate. Speaking as someone with a reasonably high but not-at-all genius level IQ, (formula fed on routine in the seventies, no less! And a 3rd child!) I'm doing a PhD surrounded by really clever people and the idea of IQ just never, ever, ever comes up. It never has during any of my degrees or classes or applications for anything, actually - having a high IQ isn't something anyone ever asks about or cares about.

Don't worry about it, OP. The struggle will be giving her enough time, if she's a 5th child, and getting out of the house on time having actually finished brushing your teeth or is that just me but I don't think you've seriously damaged her oxbridge chances just yet

At an individual level it doesn't matter much.

At an evolutionary and population level the squandering of millions of IQ points over the past decades is a bit of a tragedy.

Breastfeeding is like any other valuable natural resource: it should be protected.

its crap

Well I definitely agree with that! I have demand-led breastfed DS and will do it again with the next.

Someone upthread noted a difference between waking a baby to offer a feed because you have to go out, which I have certainly done, and making a howling baby wait, with growing hunger, because the schedule says dont feed yet. I dont think those two are alike.

Xpost. - I.agree with protecting breastfeeding!

Blackcurrants, IQ is of course only a tiny part of the entire personality of a human being.

The reason why we end up talking about it so much is that it's the part that it's easiest to measure in an unambiguous, more or less objective manner.

If it were the case that ff or (per this latest study) scheduled feeding harmed only the part of brain development that affected IQ then that would be possible, and perhaps be of less interest, but it would also be extremely surprising: the natural hypothesis from the data is that they may damage brain development in all areas, but to a limited extent so we can only notice it by means of very sensitive IQ tests. It's not a huge effect, but it's worth avoiding if reasonably possible.

(all of the above with the caveat that the demand-feeding results are far from proven)

OP, since you are worried about your 5th child's IQ I had once read that 1st borns tend to have higher IQs (I think a research done in Finland where they have exstensive family records going down for generations but can't see how relevant it is at this issue). The reason was that the rest of the children did not have as much family attention as the rest because their parents by that time had more family members and more obligations.

I could personally think of many examples of younger children outperforming the eldest but that's not research, is it? And everyone keeps saying that younder children tend to copy the older so learn more, faster etc. So I don't know what to believe.

I'm going to take this piece of research and clutch it to my saggy bosom. It would give me a tiny bit of happiness to think that the months of bfing a child who fed all the time did him some good. It might compensate for the amount of eyerolling and tutting that went on around me by those friends and family who basically thought it was a load of rubbish. They probably still think it was a load of rubbish but I don't care.
Your child can still be smart if they weren't demand fed but the research would suggest that they might be a few IQ points smarter if they had been. A couple of IQ points is neither here nor there if they are a superbrain but might be they aren't.

I agree with all those who say scheduled and demand feeding have very blurred boundaries. DS fed on demand when BF (first 7 weeks) that was 3 hour (ish) during day but slept 6 hours in night from day 1.

When he was FF he seemed to just demand bottle every 3.5-4 hours. He slept through the night for 7 hours so needed to feed more during the day to get the right amount in iyswim?

From 4 months he slept through the night, so he had a slightly higher than recommended amount of milk per bottle as didn't fit them all in and I began offering some puree/ cereal - (shoot me!)

He's 7yo now and I have no idea of his IQ but he has just been assessed as having poor working memory.

Every baby is different - they are not born the same, so won't all feed the same, and won't all have the same IQ.

It's just utter shite and bonkers.

Just think about it seriously.Think of all the things that effect IQ,really does any sane person think demand feeding is going to alter IQ,come on get real.

Anybody feeling smug,just remember said kids fed on demand will later have to cope with younger siblings having every demand met immediately,they will have to wait for things and be pushed to one side a whole lot more than those in routine led families.

Sooooo I'm guessing things will equal out eventually-should anybody want to put much stock in such a crock of shite.

Only (roughly) half the DCs fed on demand will have to defer to a younger sibling, MrsH, and even if they do, they'll be toddlers, not at the highly plastic newborn stage.
This isn't proven, it's far too fuzzy to be easily proven, but I don't see that it's obviously bollocks to say that a newborn's first experiences of the world might have a far-reaching impact on mental development.

Sorry I think to be pushed to one side will be far more damaging for a toddler/child than a newborn not least because the newborn will have fuck all memory of it unlike children who will remember the birth of a sibling for life in many cases.

All children are of equal importance and newborns are hardy,they don't melt if left to grizzle for 5/ 10 minutes.

I think bright grandparents and parents make bright children.

And nothing to do with feeding on a routine or demand feeding.

I fed on Gina Ford schedule during the day and on demand at night.

My kids are bright? normal. DD1 is in G&T program for numeracy and literacy. Of course could go off the rails and not succeed in life, these things happen.

Gina Ford is about a lot of things but withholding feeds is NOT one of them.