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Mothers should cuddle and breastfeed their babies as much as possible, and as-nature-intended care not only improves an infant’s short term survival chances, it can mean better exam results when the baby reaches his or her teenage years.
That’s according to two separate pieces of research released by British Medical Journal (BMJ) publications on June 6.
Almost 42% of babies who were not breastfed ended up flunking their English GCSE (a British secondary school exam), according to one of the journal papers. Of children who were breastfed for at least 12 months, around a fifth ended up failing the test.
At the same time, 28.5% of those breastfed for at least 12 months earned a “high pass”, compared with only 9.6% among those raised without their mothers’ milk.
When it came to maths, only 23.7% of children who were breastfed failed their GSCE test, compared with 41.9% of those never breastfed, while 31.4% of those breastfed achieved a high pass – almost triple the 11% among babies given other forms of milk or nutrition.
The researchers, from the University of Oxford, drew on data from the Millennium Cohort Study of 18,818 British children born between 2000-2002, who were followed up on at ages 3, 5, 7, 11, 14, 17 and 22. The data were in turn linked to the National Pupil Dataset, which stores longitudinal academic data from English state schools.
The researchers said that “had also taken into account the confounding effects of several markers of family-level and area-level socioeconomic status and maternal intelligence,” including previous surveys showing children from better-off families being more likely to have been breastfed.
As well as breastfeeding, it appears mothers should also deploy a method called “kangaroo mother care” for new babies, particularly those born prematurely or with a low birth weight.
Such “skin-to-skin” contact between mother and baby “appears to impact the child’s chances of survival significantly” if started “within 24 hours of birth” and carried out “for at least eight hours a day,” according to the research team, which was led by Mari Jeeva Sankar of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences’ Department of Pediatrics.
