Another reason to add to the list

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14154841/

Breastfeeding reduces anxiety into childhood
Kids cope better with stress than their bottle-fed peers, study shows

LONDON - Breastfeeding's calming effects seem to be long-lasting.

Years after being weaned, breastfed children cope better with stressful
situations like their parents' divorce than their bottle-fed peers,
researchers said on Thursday.

"In children who are breast-fed, there is less of an association between
parental divorce and separation and childhood anxiety," Dr Scott Montgomery,
an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said in an
interview.
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Breast milk is full of nutrients, hormones, enzymes, growth factors and
antibodies that are passed from mother to child.

Research has shown breast-feeding reduces infections, respiratory illness
and diarrhea in the child and cuts the risk of post-birth bleeding in the
mother.

In an observation study published in the journal Archives of Disease in
Childhood, Montgomery and his team studied how breast- and bottle-fed
10-year-olds coped with the stress of their parents' marital problems.

The children were among 9,000 youngsters who had been monitored from birth
for a major British study. Their teachers were asked to rate their anxiety
level on a scale of 0 to 50.

There was a higher level of stress in all the children but the breastfed
youngsters coped better.

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"The anxiety was much less obvious in children who were breastfed,"
Montgomery said.

The researchers do not know why breastfed babies were less anxious. They
suggested breastfeeding could be an indicator of other parental factors or
the physical contact between the mother and the child may have helped to
reduce anxiety.

Breastfeeding could also influence the development of pathways in the body
linked with its response to stress.

"The more we look at breastfeeding, the more benefits we see. As this is
something that is, in evolutionary terms, normal it is likely to be
important in normal human development," Montgomery said.


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CY wrote:

The researchers do not know why breastfed babies were less anxious. They
suggested breastfeeding could be an indicator of other parental factors or
the physical contact between the mother and the child may have helped to
reduce anxiety.

Breastfeeding could also influence the development of pathways in the body
linked with its response to stress.

All of these sorts of studies, while thought-provoking, seem to assume
the newborn is a tabula rasa. Have any ever considered the possibility
that sensitive, anxious, "difficult" children are harder to breastfeed?

Lara

All of these sorts of studies, while thought-provoking, seem to assume
the newborn is a tabula rasa. Have any ever considered the possibility
that sensitive, anxious, "difficult" children are harder to breastfeed?

probably not, but some of the phrasing seemed to indicate the comparison was
between being breastfed in the early days, not necessarily carrying on, so
it was seeming to be comparing children where breastfeeding was initiated,
versus those where breastfeeding was never even attempted.

Anne

Anne Rogers wrote:

All of these sorts of studies, while thought-provoking, seem to assume
the newborn is a tabula rasa. Have any ever considered the possibility
that sensitive, anxious, "difficult" children are harder to breastfeed?

probably not, but some of the phrasing seemed to indicate the comparison was
between being breastfed in the early days, not necessarily carrying on, so
it was seeming to be comparing children where breastfeeding was initiated,
versus those where breastfeeding was never even attempted.

Some of this stuff just smacks of junk-science fishing-expedition. I
pulled the full paper (contact me if you're interested in the details).

For the major pieces of data: breastfeeding data was collected by
parental recall once at age 5 years, and not before. The children's
anxiety and coping was "assessed" by a single question on an analogue
scale at age ten, answered by a schoolteacher, with no reference to
parents or any healthcare professional. There is no discussion of the
tabula rasa problem or the unreliability of the breastfeeding data in
the discussion.

Lara