Babies Who Are Nursed Perform Better in School, Study Finds

Chalk up one more reason to breastfeed: babies who are nursed perform better in school, new research shows.

The study, published in the Journal of Human Capital and reported by Reuters, found that siblings who were breastfed as infants got better grades in high school and were more likely to attend college than those who were not.

Co-authors Joseph Sabia, assistant professor of public policy at American University, and Daniel Rees of the University of Colorado Denver, based their research on 126 children from 59 families.

Since the authors compared sibs, they were able to account for the influence of other factors, such as the mom's intelligence.

"This is the first study that looks at long range educational outcomes like high school grade point average and college attendance," Sabia explains. "Since we looked across families, it allowed us to control for things like the mother's own cognitive ability and the family's socioeconomic status."

The study found that one additional month of breastfeeding was linked to an increase in the high school grade point average of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of college attendance of 0.014, according to Reuters.

The study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Sabia said that a couple of different factors may account for why breastfeeding increased the likelihood that the kids would do well in high school and then go on to college.

"Good health and improved cognitive ability can predict academic success, he explains, and both are associated with breastfeeding.

"Improved health in childhood and adolescence, and improved cognitive ability could be the pathways through which breastfeeding may have long range educational benefits," he says.

The new study offers compelling evidence that breastfeeding positively affects educational outcome, says Dr. Alan Mendelsohn, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and an associate professor of pediatrics at New York University School of Medicine.

He theorizes that the reason breastfed babies perform better in school may be because their mothers bonded more with them since the moms did not experience post partum depression.

"It is known that breastfeeding, besides probably reducing the incidence of asthma and obesity in the baby, also reduces the incidence of post partum depression in the mother," Mendelsohn says. "It may be that breastfeeding enhances the interactions between mother and child. Since the incidence of post partum depression is reduced, the mother may be more likely to bond with the baby."

The possible link between academic performance and breastfeeding needs to be further explored, according to Sabia.

"This is an important study but a lot more work needs to be done before we can say that there is a causal link here," he says.