Babies And Feeding

About ten years ago a friends visited me with their little son. Few weeks old. they were at my place for a quite a few hours. I noticed that the mother was feeding the little one very regular. Too regular I thought? well every 15 minutes in goes the bottle in the little mouth and burp burp, cleaned undies and sleep. I did not say a word as I have no kids and no experience except looking after babies once they are toddlers.

About eight years later I bumped into the family in a festival and got introduced to the now eight year old lad. Boy! is he bouncy or what? Too bouncy I thought , my recollections going back. Now here is what the boffins say about the feeding lark.

Ba­bies who are fed when­ev­er they want may lat­er per­form bet­ter in school than those who were fed on a sched­ule, new re­search sug­gests.



The find­ing is based on the re­sults of in­tel­li­gence tests and school-based stand­ard­ized tests car­ried out be­tween the ages of five and 14. The IQ scores of eight-year-old chil­dren who had been demand-fed as ba­bies were four to five points high­er than the scores of sched­ule-fed chil­dren, the stu­dy found. IQ tests are a meas­ure of in­tel­li­gence de­signed to ex­press the dif­fer­ence be­tween a per­son’s in­tel­li­gence and the av­er­age in­tel­li­gence for their age group, roughly as a per­cent­age.


The find­ings are pub­lished in the Eu­ro­pe­an Jour­nal of Pub­lic Health.


The study was car­ried out by re­search­ers at the In­sti­tute for So­cial and Eco­nom­ic Re­search at the Uni­vers­ity of Es­sex, U.K., and at the Uni­vers­ity of Ox­ford. But the re­search­ers urged cau­tion in in­ter­pret­ing the find­ings.

Now I have to admit that these findings are not conclusive. They have to get a better spectrum of population. for a good understanding of feeding babies there are lots of fine ideas, but you can always try this as a start, because there are lots of comments at the end.