Breastfeeding "aids class status" says study

[MissGolightly]

Story on the BBC here

Heard it on Radio 5 this morning. I felt it sounded like an awful piece of resarch with severe bias to certain sectors of the community. The implication is that 'If you bother to breastfeed, you'll be bothered as a parent' What total tosh

The research is over a long period of time and makes no allowance for changes in society and social norms. To be honest I don't feel you can make a general observation on such a topic as a blanket over the whole world when there are more factors than how you feed you lo at play really.

Mums have enough to cope with without implications that not doing something will make the rest of their child's life hell. I would ignore it TBH

There are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Saw this on BBC breakfast. They had someone from BMC (I think) and a breastfeeding expert in and I thought they treated it very well, both were saying it was not right to come out and say something like that and spoke about the guilt etc that mothers feel when they can't feed successfully.

if you look at the numbers there were large numbers who did not fit the pattern - but of those that did there was a statistical difference between those who were breastfed and those not.

But that does not mean all those who were breastfed will have leapt up the social classes (whatever that means), and all those who were bottle fed didn't. So all in all it is a pretty meaningless peice of research. Especially given that it relates to people who are not in their 70's - methods of feeding have changed many times in that time span.

I was just holding myself from saying the same. Actually, my first thoght at reading this was, Fantastic, we all should be breastfed into adulthood, it is the answer to all of our problems!

How ridiculous.

I think it sounds a bit daft, really.

But I don't think that women should be protected from these sort of findings because it might make them feel guilty, Indith. Of course if the science is flawed, then yes, it shouldn't have been released as fact, but not just because it's a bit unpalatable.

so will my gorgeous daughters now become middle class???

Breast is best that is a fact. But begone with your surveys you annoying people, ooooh it improves IQ by 0.004% etc. How do they get to these figures?

Same with childcare, nursery children are .098% more likely to become binmen etc

hogwash

Why, oh why, oh why do so many people have such difficulty understanding the concept of statistical probability????

Take the following statement:
"If you eat lots of chocolate every day, you are more likely to be overweight".

Does this mean that everyone who eats lots of chocolate every day is overweight? No! Some people have a very active lifestyle. Some people might have metabolic disorders, meaning they need to eat calories more than "normal" people, just to maintain weight. Some people might eat lots of chocolate and then throw it all up, becaue they suffer from bulimia. Etc.

Does this mean that people who don't eat chocolate are not overweihgt? No. Maybe they eat too many chips or cheese, or don't get enough exercise, or have a metabolic disorder...

So of course there are lots of people who do not fit the general trend regarding breastfeeding/social mobility. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You know how there is currently a lot of evidence that bf-ing is linked to social class and so the so-called benefits of bf-ing attributed to the families they were born into rather than bf-ing per se. (This is just a generalisation drawn from studies but not a statement on the social class of a particular bottlefed baby, just to make things clear)

However, what I found interesting about the survery is that it followed babies over 60 years at a time when "whether or not a baby was breastfed was less to do with class than it is now, when the practice is often more popular with middle-class families. In fact, there may have been a slightly increased chance that richer families would bottle-feed babies, because they would be able to afford formula milk and nannies ... The study found there was no difference in breastfeeding rates when the researchers looked at household income or social class."

My amateur interpretation of the study is that the social climbing benefits of bf-ing seems to transcend the social class of the babies' family. So less room for the correlation, rather than the causation, argument.

Interesting. Though I agree that there are probably a lot of factors at play which, not having read the survey, need to be clarified before we can make the leap to conclude that bf-ing per se facilitates social climbing (oh dear)!

hunker- I don't mean that it shouldn't be released to protect women from guilt but it is a topic that should be covered with tact and I would have liked to see the numbers included in the news story. Media does not always represent science correctly.

I'm sorry everyone for the complete hijack, this is the latest thread I found that Indith had posted on.
Indith - please check the meet up thread - I would like to rearrange tomorrow.
Hijack over.

Is it because breastfeeding is more prevalent among the educated middle classes now? I recall a survey a few yrs back saying this?
Back when formula was unaffordable to many, breastfeeding was the only option.

Just another thing for us mums to beat ourselves up about! Yesterday we were told we are bringing our kids up in the worse country of the developed world....what will it be tomorrow???

Don't believe everything you read in the news!

this study was carried out on people who were babies in the 20's and 30's, which, as far as I am aware, was way before the kind of forumla milk we have now was available. I would be interested to know how the people who weren't breastfeeding were feeding their children.

I think that was home made formula. Dr Spock gives recipes a mixture of evaporated milk, sugar and water.

I wondered if it was because (as the study says) only affluent people tended to bottle feed in those days. Obviously if you are an earl already it is quite hard to move up the social ladder another rung as there aren't that many rungs above you, whereas if you are very poor even a modest change (like your dad finding a job) can increase your social standing a lot. So perversely the fact that the breast-fed babies were poorer might mean that they were more socially mobile iyswim?

Though that doesn't explain the findings about siblings I agree. Tis weird.

Just looked up the history of formula on wikipedia and it says the first commercial formula was developed in 1867 called Liebig's Soluble Food for Babies. SMA was invented in 1924.

Looking at that wikepedia article, and also re: Goodasgold's post, it seems that in the 1920's and 30's the 'alternative' to breast milk was evaporated milk and sugar, which I really don't think is comparable to modern formula.