study shows demand-fed babies do better cognitively

[NewCovenantMama]

Study of over 10,000 children shows schedule feeding in infancy is associated with "maternal well-being" at the expense of the child's cognitive development!

http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/con...ks012.abstract

[Love_Is_Patient]

Did you notice that they said all the maternal well-being indicators were better except depression? I don't know about you, but I'll take sleep insufficiency over depression any day!

Interesting study.

[Llee]

Whoa. Interesting.

[MaryPoppinsIAin't]

I'd have to read the whole study to really form an opinion (and I can't without subscribing to the website), but given that you can set up a study to support or undermine just about any viewpoint (akin the the infamous proof-texting), a few questions immediately pop to mind. Did the researchers control for or even take into account things like economic status, family size, mother's prenatal care and diet, birth and post-birth experiences (were they separated from mom, were they premature, etc), were both parents present in the home, do the parents have a good relationship, did the children watch television and how much, the children's diet after weaning, etc etc etc. I see the brief states that they controlled "for a wide range of confounders", but there are SO many possible factors influencing a child's mental development, of which breast- and demand-feeding are only two.

Also, it would be virtually impossible to set up a controlled double-blind study for something like this, since I can't imagine ANY mother being willing to so completely turn over her parenting to the researchers, which means that this must by definition have been a retrospective study. Which also indicates that they were either following pre-selected mothers and children from birth, or cataloguing what those mothers recalled months or even years later of their children's baby years, both of which have their pitfalls.

I think it's probably safe to say that demand-feeding shows a correlation to increased intellectual ability, but I would be very hesitant to accept one study as proof of causation. That's where you start flirting with Mommy-war/Sanctimommy territory because people can very very touchy about their parenting choices, especially when science says they might have chosen poorly.