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Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

bbc.com

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Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#21

Post by jwdunne »

jtheory wrote: post #11

I'm honestly totally in favor of breast-feeding, when it's a reasonable option. I don't want anyone to avoid breast-feeding because they think (as was believed for quite a while, actually) that formula is better. But this line from the OP slightly freaked me out -- just for acknowledging the possibility: > But they say mothers should still have a choice about whether or not to do it. Have they forgotten the abortion…

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospital, where he had strict, formula-based feeding schedule. If my wife was asleep, the nurses wouldn't even bother waking her up, they'd just feed him.

The result, and not to say this is a cause but a potential contributing factor, is that this unfortunate boy has major developmental delays, is unable to speak properly and what he can say he often doesn't understand. I personally have had my past investigated by social services to ensure I won't have a negative impact on his development (I suffered from psychosis in my teenage years, likely due to stress from attention deficit disorder and a traumatic event). Teachers and myself have noticed, for example, he regularly speaks well out of context, which is notably worse than his peers. There's a tough road ahead.

With articles like this, we are looking at individual, specific factors when the reality is much more complicated and results from an interplay of thousands of microscopic to large and obvious factors. With children and their development, it is just not simple. We are, whether we like it or not, complex systems.

Parents of healthy body and mind want the best for their children. The pressure of this alone is fantastically great. The results of additional, external, pressure could do more harm than good.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#22

Post by paulfr »

Just 2 weeks ago, I won a machine learning contest with a $20,000 prize pool where the goal was to predict the IQ of a child at age 7, based on various biological measurements and demographic indicators. The data includes whether a child was breastfed.

After reading the article I did some very quick computations and my finding based on the model I developed is that children who were not breastfed have an IQ impairment in the 1-3 IQ points range, after accounting for confounding factors.

This is very consistent with the results published here.

Compared to this study, I believe the methodology I'm using is more powerful for three reasons:

- much larger sample size: the dataset I have access to comprises 12015 children, compared to 3493 for the study

- a larger set of confounding factors is accounted for: notably, the data includes height and weight measurements at up to five points in time

- confounding factors are fully accounted for, rather than hand-waved away. This is a complex model based on random forests and linear model, and the results are entirely cross-validated.

Stay tuned for more detailed computations. I will also ask the organizers for the exact definition of breastfeeding used.

---

Edit:

On the other hand, the study is still very appealing because according to the authors, there is little correlation between demographics and breastfeeding in Brazil, whereas the validity of the effect I'm reporting is dependent on whether the demographic model is powerful enough to remove the correlation. Still, I believe most of the correlation is easy to remove, and it isn't clear that there aren't subtle demographic effects even in Brazil. In particular, the proportion of participants with missing IQ data seems to decrease with duration of breastfeeding, and I don't know if they have an explanation for that.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#24

Post by dagw »

jwdunne wrote: post #21
jtheory wrote: post #11

I'm honestly totally in favor of breast-feeding, when it's a reasonable option. I don't want anyone to avoid breast-feeding because they think (as was believed for quite a while, actually) that formula is better. But this line from the OP slightly freaked me out -- just for acknowledging the possibility: > But they say mothers should still have a choice about whether or not to do it. Have they forgotten the abortion…

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

The results of additional, external, pressure could do more harm than good.

Yup. My wife, for reasons no one could really explain, hardly produced any milk. Fortunately it only took us a few days or so to realize this and start bottle feeding, but a lot of the nurses and midwives we met along the way felt no compunction in making my wife feel like a failure as a mother and human being because of this.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#25

Post by blfr »

jtheory wrote: post #11

I'm honestly totally in favor of breast-feeding, when it's a reasonable option. I don't want anyone to avoid breast-feeding because they think (as was believed for quite a while, actually) that formula is better. But this line from the OP slightly freaked me out -- just for acknowledging the possibility: > But they say mothers should still have a choice about whether or not to do it. Have they forgotten the abortion…

What about vaccines? What about genetic enhancements?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/06/everything-not-obligato...

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#26

Post by jwdunne »

dagw wrote: post #24
jwdunne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

The results of additional, external, pressure could do more harm than good. Yup. My wife, for reasons no one could really explain, hardly produced any milk. Fortunately it only took us a few days or so to realize this and start bottle feeding, but a lot of the nurses and midwives we met along the way felt no compunction in making my wife feel like a failure as a mother and human being because of this.

Same experience. We noticed that things were not going well for our daughter, Maggie, too. I told her many times "Look, if you don't feel right about this, we can go on bottles". 6 days she endured, Maggie needing to be latched pretty much every minute. The midwives encouraged her to continue, despite clear signs recent history was repeating itself.

Regardless of anything else,6 days without sleep in any form is dangerous and encouraging that behaviour could really tear families apart. Even though it's disgraceful, with this type of pressure, it's no wonder we see shaken-baby syndrome.

It's been said that the NHS is wrongly focused on curative medicine as opposed to preventative medicine. If there was ever a case for it, I'm sure this would be one.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#27

Post by codebeaker »

dagw wrote: post #24
jwdunne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

The results of additional, external, pressure could do more harm than good. Yup. My wife, for reasons no one could really explain, hardly produced any milk. Fortunately it only took us a few days or so to realize this and start bottle feeding, but a lot of the nurses and midwives we met along the way felt no compunction in making my wife feel like a failure as a mother and human being because of this.

Came here to write the same thing, my son was born 6 weeks early, hormonally my wife was not ready to breast feed at all, and we had a hugely painful, and for my wife embarrassing experience sitting hour after hour in the hospital with breast pumps and formula bottles trying to get enough, and the right balance of breast milk and formula into my son. The hospital were adamant that we kept at it, and now some four months in, I think my son has only had to be fed with ~20 bottles, total. Mostly when we're travelling or my wife and I are exhausted, I think it's a natural and important part of raising a child, but not everyone can do it, we were lucky, and we need more tolerance of personal choice or circumstance without being judgemental.

Of course until becoming a parent, I had my strong and largely invalid opinions (i.e breast feeding in public is inappropriate, etc) I'm happy to say I've got past those short sighted and ill conceived views and won't judge anyone for anything they do for their child, probably there's a damned good reason why they're doing it, lack of sleep, exhaustion, and a baby crying are pretty powerful motivators to step outside of one's own personal comfort zone.

Other hot topics (especially as a Brit living in Germany, seeing the cultural differences) are sharing a bed with an infant, bathing with them, skin-on-skin contact, etc, etc.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#28

Post by gadders »

jwdunne wrote: post #21
jtheory wrote: post #11

I'm honestly totally in favor of breast-feeding, when it's a reasonable option. I don't want anyone to avoid breast-feeding because they think (as was believed for quite a while, actually) that formula is better. But this line from the OP slightly freaked me out -- just for acknowledging the possibility: > But they say mothers should still have a choice about whether or not to do it. Have they forgotten the abortion…

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

>> In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk.

This mirrors what happened to us in an NHS hospital in the UK. As a result, my daughter's blood sugar dropped dangerously low as we were encourage to persist in breast feeding for far longer than we should have.

She's also on the gifted and talented programme at her school now, so I don't think Formula did her any harm.

Re: Breastfeeding 'linked to higher IQ'

#30

Post by deepGem »

jwdunne wrote: post #21
jtheory wrote: post #11

I'm honestly totally in favor of breast-feeding, when it's a reasonable option. I don't want anyone to avoid breast-feeding because they think (as was believed for quite a while, actually) that formula is better. But this line from the OP slightly freaked me out -- just for acknowledging the possibility: > But they say mothers should still have a choice about whether or not to do it. Have they forgotten the abortion…

In some cases, the pressure to breastfeed can do more harm than good. If the parent is feeling stressed, as it can be an extremely intense and also painful experience, the bonding process can suffer. More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk. The father of my adopted son forced my wife to breastfeed. Over a 3 month period, the poor boy lost a dangerous amount of weight and needed a stay in hospit…

"More importantly, some mothers just cannot produce enough milk" - Is there any anecdotal evidence to prove this. One lactation consultant told us that this claim is totally false. According to her, all women who give birth can and will produce enough breast milk and she had the evidence to prove that.
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