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Title: Is Breast Truly Best? Estimating the Effects of Breastfeeding on Long-term Child Health and Wellbeing in the United States Using Sibling Comparisons
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Colen, Cynthia G. Ramey, David |
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Is Breast Truly Best? Estimating the Effects of Breastfeeding on Long-term Child Health and Wellbeing in the United States Using Sibling Comparisons Social Science and Medicine 109 (May 2014): 55-65. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614000549 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): Asthma; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Body Mass Index (BMI); Breastfeeding; CESD (Depression Scale); Child Health; Depression (see also CESD); Digit Span (also see Memory for Digit Span - WISC); Infants; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Obesity; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Pre-natal Care/Exposure; Pre/post Natal Behavior; Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC); Siblings; Temperament; Weight Breastfeeding rates in the U.S. are socially patterned. Previous research has documented startling racial and socioeconomic disparities in infant feeding practices. However, much of the empirical evidence regarding the effects of breastfeeding on long-term child health and wellbeing does not adequately address the high degree of selection into breastfeeding. To address this important shortcoming, we employ sibling comparisons in conjunction with 25 years of panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to approximate a natural experiment and more accurately estimate what a particular child’s outcome would be if he/she had been differently fed during infancy. Results from standard multiple regression models suggest that children aged 4 to 14 who were breast- as opposed to bottle-fed did significantly better on 10 of the 11 outcomes studied. Once we restrict analyses to siblings and incorporate within-family fixed effects, estimates of the association between breastfeeding and all but one indicator of child health and wellbeing dramatically decrease and fail to maintain statistical significance. Our results suggest that much of the beneficial long-term effects typically attributed to breastfeeding, per se, may primarily be due to selection pressures into infant feeding practices along key demographic characteristics such as race and socioeconomic status. |
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Bibliography Citation
Colen, Cynthia G. and David Ramey. "Is Breast Truly Best? Estimating the Effects of Breastfeeding on Long-term Child Health and Wellbeing in the United States Using Sibling Comparisons." Social Science and Medicine 109 (May 2014): 55-65.
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