Women who breastfeed for five months likely to have more kids

Turns out, women who breastfeed their first child for five months or longer are more likely to have more children as compared to women who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all.

BS| Cornell University professor of sociology Vida Maralani, with Hunter College professor Samuel Stabler, reported that women who initiate breastfeeding did not differ in how many children they expected to have before they started their families.

Rather, the number of children women actually bear differs by how long they breastfeed their first child. Women who breastfeed for shorter durations are more likely to have fewer children than they expected, while women who breastfeed longer are as likely to achieve their expectations to exceed them.

The researchers caution that their results do not imply that breastfeeding duration causes women to have larger families. They write, “Our study reveals the opposite: the interconnectedness of family preferences and child investment across the life course.”

“Women hear the strong message that they should breastfeed their infants for the first year of life, yet it is unambiguously clear that they find these guidelines difficult to follow in practice,” said Maralani.

The researchers used a nationally representative longitudinal dataset, from 1979 to 2012, which provides information on a cohort of nearly 3,700 mothers. They measured women’s expected fertility at least one year before women conceived their first child to examine the link between their expectations of future fertility and actual behavior.

These data also enabled the authors to account for differences in breastfeeding and fertility by education, age, marital status, family income, and work histories.

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3 in 5 babies not breastfed in first hour of life

According to United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organization (WHO), around 78 million babies or three in every five are not breastfed within the first hour of the birth, putting them at a higher risk of death and disease and making them less likely to continue breastfeeding.

Most of these babies are born in low- and middle-income countries.

According to the report, newborns who breastfeed in the first hour of life are significantly more likely to survive. Even a delay of a few hours after birth could pose life-threatening consequences.

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It should be noted that skin-to-skin contact along with suckling at the breast stimulates the mother’s production of breast milk, including colostrum, also called the baby’s ‘first vaccine’, which is extremely rich in nutrients and antibodies.

UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H. Fore said, “When it comes to the start of breastfeeding, timing is everything. In many countries, it can even be a matter of life or death,” adding, “Yet each year, millions of newborns miss out on the benefits of early breastfeeding and the reasons – all too often – are things we can change. Mothers simply don’t receive enough support to breastfeed within those crucial minutes after birth, even from medical personnel at health facilities.”

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