Breast-Feeding and Intelligence

Breast Feeding and Intelligence
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Institutional Affiliation
Breast Feeding and Intelligence
Intelligence in human beings varies from the stage of early adulthood and adolescence to when the body attains full maturity, in that cognitive development is optimal in early adulthood and lesser or damaged at full maturity due to factors such as drugs and mental illnesses. The research was conducted on a group of adults and their mothers based on their duration of breastfeeding and other covariates to determine and draw a hypothesis on the relation between the period of breastfeeding and intelligence.
The hypothesis drawn from this research is that child breastfeeding for more than seven months is effective in cognitive development and brain growth but is equally meaningless to breastfeed for more than nine months. Also, the tests taken show that covariates such as parental demographic characteristics including social status and education in different individual lives affected the overall relation between breastfeeding and intelligence (Mortensen et al., 2002). The covariates in this research show that the independent variables were such as the complications arising during pregnancy and the gestational period and age, while the dependent variables were the parental education statuses, parental genetics and the social life of the mother during the perinatal period (Mortensen et al., 2002).
Important terms and concepts in need of definition are such as; cohorts are meaning a group identified by their same age as they move through life together, cognitive development describes the human thinking and reasoning over a period, perinatal defines the period before and after birth.

Evidence provided by the researchers are such as the cohort born in the nineteen-sixties who were breastfed and the cohort born from two thousand until presently who were bottle fed on artificial milk, showing the positive effects of cognitive development in the first cohort than the second. The evidence is observable and is valid since the modern age medicine design of artificial milk.
Researcher’s explanations for the conclusions of the hypothesis are that differences between human milk and artificial formulas, i.e., human milk contains nutrients that enhance brain growth, and contact between the mother and child enhances psychological development (Mortensen et al., 2002). These explanations make sense based on the explanation. The type of food consumed affects brain growth and intelligence in many insignificant ways than breastfeeding nutrients.
In summary, the alternative explanations for this study may be that covariates influence intelligence considering parental genetics. Researchers could make casual connections between independent and dependent variables. Practical implications for this research are insignificantly possible and present in this modern age considering the high rate of single motherhood and abandonment of children at infancy.

References
Mortensen, E. L., Michaelsen, K. F., Sanders, S. A., & Reinisch, J. M. (2002). The association between duration of breastfeeding and adult intelligence. Jama, 287(18), 2365-2371