Breastfeeding helps babies handle stress in a better manner

Breastfeeding helps babies handle stress in a better manner

New research suggests that breastfeeding helps babies handle stress in a better manner. The study published online by the Archives of Disease in Childhood; found that children who are weaned naturally were less affected by anxiety, as they grew older than children who were given the bottle or formula milk.

The study of nearly 9,000 British children was conducted with the help of data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Information regarding breastfeeding was obtained at birth, when the child was five years old and at the age of 10. The data, which included the baby's birth weight and whether they were breastfed, was obtained from midwives, health visitors, parents, and teachers.

When the children were aged 10, teachers were asked to rate whether they were anxious. Parents were also asked about any family problems like divorce and separation. It was found that kids coming from broken families were anxious, but those who were breastfed coped better with this anxiety. The study said that breastfed children were twice as anxious about parental divorce, but children fed on bottle were nine times more anxious than breastfed children.

"The analysis found parental divorce and separation were associated with a greater anxiety among children who were not breast fed than among breast fed children," said lead researcher Dr Scott Montgomery, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The researchers said that their study did not try to say that breastfeeding reduced anxiety, rather the study pointed out that breastfeeding helps children respond in a better way.

"Breast feeding is associated with resilience against the psychosocial stress linked with parental divorce or separation. This could be because breast feeding is a marker of exposures related to maternal characteristics and parent–child interaction," Dr Montgomery said. "The benefits of breast feeding are well recognized and this study indicates it may be associated with lower levels of anxiety among children who have had the potentially stressful experience of parental divorce."