I am currently studying for a Masters and in some of my recent 
assignments I have looked very thoroughly for references to show 
links between breastfeeding and later emotional and mental well-being 
including social adjustment.  The title of my assignment was a 
literature review of Infant feeding and its associations with 
emotional well-being, in mother and child.

The fact is, there is hardly any robust research out there at all. 
There are many, many papers and studies which purport to find a link, 
but the studies are flawed, mainly because

* the definition of 'breastfeeding' is not clear - 'any' 
breastfeeding may be recorded as 'breastfeeding' ; there is no 
attempt to differentiate between exclusive and partial; some papers 
make a distinction between 'breastfeeding for x months' and 
'breastfeeding for y months'  but not all

* the controlling for confounding factors is very variable - much 
less well done than the research into physical health outcomes

Julie mentions this study:

>
>
>-Montogomery, S.M. et al.  Breastfeeding and resilience against 
>psychosocial stress.  Arch Dis Child 2006; 91: 990-94.

Now, this is an interesting study with a big sample (almost 9000 
children), and it was one of the papers I took apart for  my 
assignment.  It purports to show that breastfed children cope better 
with psychosocial stress, operationalised as their reaction to later 
parental divorce/separation.  This reaction is scored by their 
teachers and their parents.  The breastfed children appeared less 
anxious (at age 5 and 10) than the non-breastfed children - and many 
of the non-feeding related reasons why this might be so are 
controlled for. The length of time the children had been breastfed is 
defined and there seems to be a 'dose response' effect.

My superviser did not like this study much, but he is a sociologist 
whose special area of research interest is divorce, so he thought the 
divorce part of the research was pretty crude. I thought the 
breastfeeding part of the research was pretty crude ( no 
differentiation of full or partial bf, for example).

But from my reading, it's about the best study there is in this 
field, academically speaking, despite its flaws.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK

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