Children of poorer mothers who breastfeed are much better at tasks involving speaking, drawing and comprehension, a British study has found, saying they do 8% better in tests of their cognitive ability up to the age of seven – if they were breastfed for at least three months – than those who were bottle-fed.
Breastfeeding boosts brain development among the offspring of disadvantaged mothers to such an extent that they are better prepared than children reared on formula milk to start primary school, said the researchers.
The findings corroborate evidence that breastfeeding is good for children, reports The Guardian.
Nevertheless, while previous studies have mainly linked intake of breast milk at an early age to physical health, this latest paper, based on analysis of data on almost 6,000 British children, is one of the first to show it improves their cognitive skills.
The study also found that women with a low level of education who gave birth at weekends were less likely to breastfeed their children because of a lack of staff on duty in hospitals to help them establish the habit.
Professor Emla Fitzsimons from University College London’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies and Professor Marcos Vera-Hernandez, from its economics department, analysed data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,000 British children born across the UK during 2000-02 who are taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study, whose mothers left school before turning 17 and who had a natural or low-risk birth.
Fitzsimons said their findings were “statistically significant”.
They found that, for example, at the age of three, breastfed children scored on average 9.88 points more at using “expressive language” – in which they are shown pictures of objects and asked to name them – than the average for all children, which was 70.4 points.
Three-year-old breastfed children also scored an average 8.3 points more for “school readiness” – command of core skills involving literacy and numeracy – than the average among all children of that age, of 22.2.
The same differences were seen when children were tested again at the age of five, and were also seen at that age in an assessment of visuo-spatial skill – their ability to replicate a design using pattered squares – and “pictorial reasoning”, in which they analyse pictures.
The study, published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, says: “Our results, which apply to mothers with relatively low levels of education, are striking. We find strong effects of breastfeeding in children’s cognitive development, the effects of non-cognitive skills are inconclusive, and we find no evidence of effects on health during this period of childhood.”
Better-off women are much more likely to breastfeed than poorer ones. The UK-wide Infant Feeding Survey of 2010, which contains the most recent data on the subject, found that only 30% of women who left full-time education at the age of 17 or 18 had breastfed their child for at least four months whereas 56% of those who left after 18 did so.
Study details
Breastfeeding and Child Development
Emla Fitzsimons, Marcos Vera-Hernández
Published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics vol 14, July 2022
Abstract
We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's development in the first seven years of life, for a sample of births of low-educated mothers. We find large effects of breastfeeding on children's cognitive development but no effects on health or noncognitive development during the period of childhood we consider. Regarding mechanisms, we study how breastfeeding affects parental investments and the quality of the mother-child relationship.
American Economic Journal article – Breastfeeding and Child Development (Open access)
NHS Infant Feeding Scheme survey 2010 (Open access)
Millennium Cohort Study (Open access)
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