Borstvoeding
voor kinderen die beter met stress kunnen omgaan.*
Uit een langjarige Engelse studie blijkt dat kinderen die na de geboorte borstvoeding gehad hebben tot wel vijf keer beter met stress kunnen omgaan dan zij die geen borstvoeding hebben gehad. Vermoedelijk zijn het niet de stoffen uit de voeding die het verschil maken doch andere factoren zoals het speciale fysieke contact tussen moeder en baby waardoor ook een speciale langdurige band kan ontstaan. Dit wordt nog ondersteund door eerdere dierenproeven die lieten zien dat de kwaliteit van het contact tussen moeder en baby in de eerste dagen belangrijk is voor een goede ontwikkeling van het zenuw- en hormonenstelsel.
Breastfed
Babies Cope Better With Stress In Later Life Than Bottle Fed Babies
Breastfed
babies cope better with stress in later life than bottle fed babies, suggests
research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood
The findings are based on almost 9000 children, who were part of the 1970
British Cohort Study, which regularly monitors a sample of the British
population from birth onwards.
Relevant information was obtained at the children's birth, and at the ages of 5
and 10 years, from midwives and health visitors, parents, and teachers. This
included how much the child weighed at birth and whether s/he was breastfed.
It also included factors that might influence or be linked with a child's
reactions to stress and coping mechanisms, including maternal depression,
parental education levels, their social class, and smoking habits.
When the children were 10 years old, their teachers were also asked to rate the
anxiety of their pupils on a scale of zero to 50, while parents were interviewed
about major family disruption, including divorce or separation, which had
occurred when their child was between 5 and 10 years of age.
Unsurprisingly, when all the data were analysed, the findings pointed to a
greater likelihood of high anxiety among children whose parents had divorced or
separated.
But children who had been breastfed were significantly less anxious than their
peers who had not been breastfed.
Breastfed children were almost twice as likely to be highly anxious, while
children who had been bottle fed were over 9 times as likely to be highly
anxious about parental divorce/separation.
The findings held true, irrespective of other factors likely to influence the
results.
The authors emphasise that their research does not prove that breastfeeding
itself makes children cope better with life stress; rather, it may be a marker
of some other maternal or parental factors, they say.
But they cite animal research, which suggests that the quality of physical
contact between mother and baby during the first few days of life may influence
the development of the offspring's neural and hormonal pathways that are
involved in the stress response. Babies with more of the type of contact
experienced during breast feeding coped better with stress when older.
Breastfeeding may also affect the quality of the bonding between mother and
child, and the way in which the two relate to each other. And this may have a
lasting impact on the child's anxiety levels in response to stressful life
events, the authors suggest.
###
[Breast feeding and resilience against psychosocial stress Online First Arch Dis
Child 2006 doi: 101136/adc.2006.096826]
(Aug. 2006)