Was Huw Edwards breastfed? One wouldn’t normally speculate about an eminent BBC newsreader’s infant nutrition, but what with the disclosure that his Oxbridge rejection still rankles, and new research suggesting inadequately breastfeeding mothers could put their children at academic risk, it might be time to ask just how much intellectual disappointment is, if we’re honest, women’s fault.
The Times was so delighted with the idea that it wrote a whole leader in support: “Breast Boost: It’s increasingly clear that breastfeeding makes for brainy babies”. More breastfeeding, it claimed, with the kind of confidence you simply don’t get from a year on formula, “would benefit everybody”. Compliant mothers might want to memorise a few lines in case they come up against a different academic finding: that one of the many reasons women abandon it is other people’s disgust and public sexualisation of breastfeeding.
Elsewhere, news sources usually indifferent to latching on, milk supply, breast pumps and other lactation issues of national importance, were likewise entranced by the – apparently settled – discovery that, as one put it, “Breastfed babies are more brainy”. So do gift any mother you happen to spot, not only those in your family or friendship group, with this reminder of what’s at stake – for everybody – in premature weaning. It really is down to individual mothers to raise Britain up from its shameful place near the bottom of the world breastfeeding rankings.
Some have speculated, in fact, that a country being so bad at breastfeeding might be linked to it being often worst at Eurovision: something else for mothers to consider. Either way, as the new research on breastfeeding reminds us, you can’t simply rule out a connection.
Turning to that study, “Association between breastfeeding duration and educational achievement in England”, mothers, new and old, may welcome findings that, if they hadn’t been overhyped, seem to offer cause for neither regrets, nor for rethinking existing breastfeeding/formula plans. The reports around its publication could just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, have been entitled, “Breastfeeding won’t help your kid with maths”; “Nursing mums: ‘correlation is not causation’”; “Frustrated mansplainers celebrate new opportunities in breast milk.” Since what news stories tended, strikingly, to overlook in this study, were its caveats.
The authors note that in countries where breastfeeding is not positively associated with socioeconomic position, it is not related to school achievement. They can only speculate on the reasons for the modestly improved results in their own study. The paper ends by urging women, or those in charge of them, to do the right thing anyway. “Breastfeeding should continue to be encouraged when possible,” they counsel, “as the potential improvements in academic achievement seen in this study constitute only one of its potential benefits.”
Many British women have, it’s true, resisted expert advocacy, from the World Health Organization’s prescription (“Breastfed children perform better on intelligence tests”) to, in 1695, Henry Newcome’s in The Compleat Mother, or, An earnest perswasive to all mothers (especially those of rank and quality) to nurse their own children. “I acknowledge there are but very few Persons of Quality that stoop to this Employment,” he writes, “but this ought not to discourage you from it, but rather confirm your Resolution to undertake it, as it gives you an opportunity to shew your selves Singularly good Mothers.”
If this took time to catch on, it is the greater popularity of breastfeeding among better-off women in the UK that now complicates attempts to show, as in the new study, that it is breastfeeding – and not, say, the food, books, nurseries, music lessons, tutoring, etc, those mothers might also supply – that causes the modestly improved exam results they report.
The authors are alert to such “confounding factors” in their observational study, and a press release makes much of relevant adjustments to their figures, factoring in socioeconomic position and (assuming defining 12 words is a useful enough guide) maternal intelligence.
However as Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, explains in his review of the paper, that “does not entirely get the researchers off the hook of not being able to be sure what causes what”. The findings take no account of children’s preschooling, of parental health and relationships. The researchers did not adjust for the father’s cognitive ability, factoring in only the mother’s verbal intelligence.
Although, as Prof McConway noted, you’d not know that from a misleading press release: “The evidence of improved educational outcomes is still apparent”, it says, “even when various factors are taken into account such as people’s socioeconomic status and their parents’ intelligence.”
The paper’s actual limitations for responsible breastfeeding promoters featured only at the end of the release: “the effect sizes were modest and may be susceptible to residual confounding”.
Even if it lacks the authority to shape women’s decisions about breastfeeding, there is no doubting the power of this study to make them feel bad, including retrospectively. Is there no way of going back to the exam boards; asking for a lamentable breastfeeding record to be taken into account?
Given the known, sometimes debilitating distress of women who are unable to breastfeed, or to sustain it while returning to work, you might think it fairly mischievous to risk, on such evidence, deepening it.
Still, it’s been instructive to see the enthusiasm with which news organisations embraced this chance – in contrast to the National Conservatives’ scheme for replenishing the nation – to remind women of their handmaiden status.
In the excitement you could easily forget that some women might think even a genuinely increased chance of somewhat improved GCSEs a fairly shabby reward for their sacrifice, after a year’s breastfeeding, of sleep, work, functioning, shared care. Fair dos. If it’s not exchangeable for a doctorate, you’d want some assurance of your child becoming, at a minimum, a cherished television presenter who ultimately triumphs over an Oxford college.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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