Breastfed children smarter due to accompanying parenting skills

Two parenting skills - responding to a child's emotional cues and reading to them by 9 months of age - is what actually makes breastfed children smarter, a new study says.

Past studies on children who were breastfed by their mothers showed that these kids scored higher on IQ tests and performed better in school, but the reason was unclear. Now a recent study by sociologists at Brigham Young University shows that breastfeeding mothers tend to possess these two parenting skills.

"It's really the parenting that makes the difference," lead author Brian Gibbs said in a statement. "Breastfeeding matters in others ways, but this actually gives us a better mechanism and can shape our confidence about interventions that promote school readiness."

The BYU team followed 7,500 mothers and their children from birth to five years of age. They compiled data on the home environment, like how early and how often parents read to their kids, and measured the mother's supportiveness and sensitivity to their child's emotional cues via home video tapes. Children who were breastfed for six months or longer performed the best on reading assessments because they also "experienced the most optimal parenting practices," Gibbs said.

Through analysis, researchers noticed improvements in sensitivity to emotional cues and time reading to children could result in two to three months' worth of brain development by age 4, as measured by math and reading readiness assessments.

Of course this child-mother quality time, researchers note, suffers in at-risk children - those of single working moms, for one, or parents with less education who don't necessarily hear about research-based parenting practices.

"This is the luxury of the advantaged," BYU professor and co-author Renata Forste said. "It makes it harder to think about how we promote environments for disadvantaged homes. These things can be learned and they really matter. And being sensitive to kids and reading to kids doesn't have to be done just by the mother."