After a woman has a baby and her milk has come in, the cry of her baby – or any other baby within earshot – often triggers a letting response, in which milk is made available for nursing. It seems that this response designed by nature may have known something that a new study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council at the University of Oxford is finally corroborating: it is better to feed a baby on demand than require him or her to stick to a schedule – at least if you want your child to fare better academically.
The argument for and against on-demand feeding has been long and arduous, with leaders emerging on both sides of the debate. Although it may mean parents are left a little more sleep deprived, children who were fed on demand as infants scored higher on academic tests and have higher IQs than their schedule-fed counterparts. Additionally, it did not appear to make a difference whether the baby was fed breast milk or formula (although breast milk has other benefits), so dads can play a role in on-demand feeding as well.
As might be expected, while the children who were breastfed on demand fared better academically, mothers who fed their babies at scheduled feeding times reported a higher sense of well-being. Moms who schedule fed also felt more confident and more in control of their emotions.
This is the first large-scale study comparing demand-fed versus schedule-fed babies. More than 10,000 children were included in the study and other factors, like income, education levels of the parents, gender of the children, and maternal health were controlled. The difference was apparent in both breast- and bottle-fed babies, and while the IQ difference is only a few points, it is statistically significant enough to make many moms think it might be worth the sacrifice of sleep.
With academic achievement becoming more and more competitive and parents planning before their child is in preschool what they can do to give their child an advantage when applying to college, this is one more factor parents can take into account – one that might make you lose sleep in the short term but can pay off in the long term with higher academic test scores and higher IQs.
The key may be balance. Since there was no appreciable difference between bottle-fed and breast-fed babies, as long as they were fed on demand, moms and dads can share in the responsibility for meeting the baby’s feeding demands. Moms can pump ahead so that dads can share in the responsibility; dads can help keep moms from losing the sense of well-being that comes from obtaining a decent amount of sleep, and babies can have their hunger demands met in a way that gives them a life-long edge.