@mikailao20 One thing that drives me crazy is that the statistics that suggest children have a higher IQ are all very poorly done studies. I got this from a really great
article that delves into it:
“In reality, the causal link is much more tenuous. We can see this by looking carefully at a number of studies that compare children who were breastfed to their siblings who were not. These studies tend to find no relationship between breastfeeding and IQ. The children who were nursed did no better on IQ tests than their siblings who were not.
This conclusion differs fundamentally from the studies without sibling comparisons. One very nice study gives us an answer to why. The key to this study is that the authors analyze the same sample of kids in a bunch of different ways. First, they compare children who are breastfed with those who are not with a few simple controls. When they do this, they find large differences in child IQ between the breastfed kids and those who are not. In the second phase, they add an adjustment for the mother’s IQ, and find that the effect of breastfeeding is much smaller—much of the effect attributed to breastfeeding in the first analysis was due to differences in the mothers’ IQs—but does still persist.
But then the authors do a third analysis where they compare siblings—children born to the same mother—one of whom was breastfed and one who was not. This is valuable because it takes into account all the differences between the moms, not just their performance on one IQ test. In this analysis, researchers see that breastfeeding doesn’t have a significant impact on IQ. This suggests that it is something about the mother (or the parents in general), not anything about breast milk, that is driving the breastfeeding effect in the first analysis.”