Breast Milk Versus Bottle-Feeding

Breast Milk Versus Bottle-Feeding
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Breast Milk Versus Bottle-Feeding
Introduction
The early stages of development for the human species are the most delicate yet very crucial in the success of the subsequent stages of life. For far too long, breastfeeding has been the primary source of nutrition for infants not only for the human species but also many other mammals. Growing research in the field of infant and toddler development coupled with other medical and health issues that have emerged in the recent past has led to the disregard of breastfeeding as the only option for raising an infant at least to the toddler stage of life. Earlier in time, lactating mothers who had no enough breast milk to raise their own newborn or even in a case of death had the option to hand over their newborn to other lactating mothers to breastfeed their infants (Abrahams & Labbok, 2011). In this day and age characterized by infectious diseases and complexities that come along with the industrial revolution that has seen the female gender play a significant role in almost every industry as much as their male counterparts, bottle milk or formula milk has almost substituted breast milk while also raising a lot of contention in the field of infant and toddler development.
Breast Feeding and Cognitive development
Scholars have documented consistent and hardly undisputed health benefits of breastfeeding infants up to at least six months. The major element of contention arises when some scholars on infant development argue that breastfeeding an infant has a significant correlation with cognitive development while others have established no significant impact. Oddy et al. (2011), in their research “ Breastfeeding and early child development: a prospective cohort study,” embarked on a prospective study to establish the correlation between exclusive breastfeeding of infants for at least the first four months and development. The authors acknowledged the several developmental advantages of breastfeeding but singled out cognitive development as the most important facet of development that demonstrated interdependence with breastfeeding.
Oddy et al. (2011) enrolled 2900 lactating mothers and their newborns totaling 2868 into the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort. Thereafter, a questionnaire was used to capture the infant feeding data and to monitor the developmental variance from the different lactating mothers and the infants, with the sociodemographic attributes acting as the main variable. Other significant variables that were captured during the enrolment process were the medical history of the parents partaking in the research. To measure the developmental process of the infants, the Infant Monitoring Questionnaire (IMQ) contained numerous questions subdivided into distinct sections namely: communication, gross motor, fine motor, adaptive and social development (Oddy et al., 2011). The empirical evidence obtained from the experiment affirmed the hypothesis that exclusive breastfeeding for at least four months results in higher developmental scores and therefore substituting breast milk with bottled milk denies the infant opportunity to sore the improved developmental outcome associated with exclusive breastfeeding. Oddy et al. (2011), however, acknowledge that the analysis had a very minute effect and therefore the conclusion might be skewed.
Null Effect of Breastfeeding on Cognitive Development
Other researchers have established that breast milk has zero effect on the brain development of an infant. Rather, cognitive development is influenced by maternal cognitive and socioeconomic effects (Walfisch et al., 2014). Walfisch et al. (2014), in their systematic review “Breast milk and cognitive development—the role of confounders: a system...