Today’s Guardian includes a piece on the supposed benefits of breast-feeding made for interesting reading. Apparently, breast-feeding has been shown to aid social mobility. The article is based on research to be published in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood.
For some time now, midwives have actively (indeed, sometimes aggressively) advocated that breast-feeding babies is better than bottle-feeding. This has been because evidence has suggested that breastfeeding aids bonding between mother and child, as well as neurocognitive development in later life, i.e. children will be brighter. Because of these claims, I have witnessed on a number of occasions new mothers being reduced to tears on post-natal wards by midwives insisting that bottlefeeding is ‘short-changing’ the new born. Unfortunately, I fear today’s ‘findings’ will encourage more such behaviour.
Closer inspection of the report reveals that the difference between the bottle-fed and breast-fed groups in terms of moving up a social class was pretty small – 58% as compared to 50%. The data, extracted from the Boyd Orr study of diet and health in pre-war Britain, has been assessed by Richard Martin, Reader in clinical epidemiology at the University of Bristol. Interestingly, he has admitted that the findings should be treated with caution.
Claims about the relative benfits of breastfeeding are widely reported. There has been, however, some dispute over their validity. An article published in the British Medical Journal last year indicated that a child’s living environment was more important in influencing social mobility than breastfeeding. It concluded that intelligence was determined by many factors other than breast-feeding. Although, it still advocated that breastfeeding was “the smart thing to do.”
Despite a concerted government-funded campaign over the last few years, only 76% of British women breast-feed. Even though mothers are encouraged to breast feed for the first six months, less than 30% actually do so. And this is also despite the active campaigning of midwives. Most doctors known that midwives are notorious for being ‘pro-active’ about the benefits of breast-feeding. Undeniably, the ‘immunity’ conferred from mother to child in the first few days cannot be achieved by bottle-feeding, however, after that it remains far from confirmed that breast-feeding is so particularly advantageous to the baby. The advantages certainly do not warrant upsetting mothers by making them feel inadequate. Hopefully, this research will not be used in the same way. Social mobility has gone down under this government. A more likely conclusion is that, that has more to do with the performance of the education sector than with the popularity of breast-feeding. My mother tells me I did just fine on Carnation milk. It is for others to determine whether I have been socially mobile.
