So there is a new study out today that argues that 9 out of 10 children who are breastfed are up 7 IQ points smarter than children who aren’t. That’s not how the media has phrased it of course – don’t want to enrage (or panic!) those non-breastfeeding moms. They only focused on the positives. Ugh!
If Moms don’t put enough pressure on themselves about breastfeeding as it is.
Kamryn was half breast-fed. I managed to squeeze out about half of what she needed. Was that enough? Hope so. If not I hope that nature gave her enough IQ points without my help.
Sam of course wasn’t breastfed. One more thing to have me worry about with him. He had such a rough start and I worry almost constantly about how it has/will affect his cognitive potential. My latest worry in my quest to drive myself batty is his inability to spell his name. As his name isn’t really Sam, some difficulty is to be expected, but it’s not really his inability to actually spell it that bothers me. It’s his inability to learn how. He spells his name wrong the SAME way EVERY time – no matter how often you correct him. If you work on it with him he will stop making that mistake but he gets all flustered and the stuff he knows goes out the window completely. It’s the same with the Lord’s prayer. He says it every night. He says it wrong every night. The SAME mistake. It’s almost a year now that he has been saying it wrong. And I correct him and we try it again and he gets it wrong again. In a ten second span he can get it wrong as many times as I can get him to repeat the phrase he messes up on. We say it EVERY night.
Not to compare children (don’t frown at me that way as I do just that) but without working on it at all Kamryn could say the same prayer in two different languages without making any errors at a much younger age than Sam is now. We don’t work in two languages with Sam at all although he speaks english fine for a kid whose parents continually discourage it. I think, where it matters, it would confuse him too much so we do everything – counting, the alphabet etc. in French only. I’m looking forward to him starting school next year so that professionals can tell me to stop worrying.
This is kind of dumb – can you tell I wasn’t breastfed?
National News
4 years ago
1 comment:
I haven't seen this study, but many of the previous studies of the breastfeeding/IQ link were classic cases of "correlation is not causation." Currently in the US (and probably Canada too) breastfeeding is more prevalent among higher socioeconomic groups and these groups also have way more resources in general to offer children as they develop. In addition, there is some thought that moms who choose to breastfeed tend (on average) to have higher IQs themselves or to be more likely to research about child development. So it's not necessarily the breastfeeding; it's the other stuff that is also correlated with breastfeeding.
That said, I'm not saying breastfeeding itself doesn't raise IQ. I'm just saying I don't think that the previous evidence was great. I'd be curious to see the new study and if they had solved the problem. (What one needs is an exogenous shock to the likelihood of breastfeeding that has nothing to do with the mother's characteristics. Something like the price of formula rising. Or all the hospitals in a state suddenly refusing to give out formula samples.)
Post a Comment