All About Your Child

I love news like these!

A new study in Washington provides some of the best evidence to date that breast-feeding can make children smarter, an international team of researchers said on Monday.

Children whose mothers breast-fed them longer and did not mix in baby formula scored higher on intelligence tests, the researchers in Canada and Belarus reported.

……At 3 months, 73 percent of the babies in the breast-feeding encouragement group were breast-fed, compared to 60 percent of the other group. At 6 months, it was 50 percent versus 36 percent.In addition, the group given encouragement was far more likely to give their children only breast milk. The rate was seven times higher, for example, at 3 months.

The children were monitored for about 6 1/2 years.

The children in the group where breast-feeding was encouraged scored about 5 percent higher in IQ tests and did better academically, the researchers found.

Previous studies had indicated brain development and intelligence benefits for breast-fed children.

But researchers have sought to determine whether it was the breast-feeding that did it, or that mothers who prefer to breast-feed their babies may differ from those who do not.

The design of the study — randomly assigning babies to two groups regardless of the mothers’ characteristics — was intended to eliminate the confusion.

‘MOTHERS WHO BREAST-FEED … ARE DIFFERENT’

“Mothers who breast-feed or those who breast-feed longer or most exclusively are different from the mothers who don’t,” Dr. Michael Kramer of McGill University in Montreal and the Montreal Children’s Hospital said in a telephone interview.

“They tend to be smarter. They tend to be more invested in their babies. They tend to interact with them more closely. They may be the kind of mothers who read to their kids more, who spend more time with their kids, who play with them more,” added Kramer, who led the study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

(That’s me, that’s me….)

…..The researchers measured the differences between the two groups using IQ tests administered by the children’s pediatricians and by ratings by their teachers of their school performance in reading, writing, math and other subjects.

Both sets of scores were significantly higher in the children from the breast-feeding promotion group.

Kramer said how breast-feeding may make children more intelligent is unclear.

“It could even be that because breast-feeding takes longer, the mother is interacting more with the baby, talking with the baby, soothing the baby,” he said. “It could be an emotional thing. It could be a physical thing. Or it could be a hormone or something else in the milk that’s absorbed by the baby.”

……Previous studies have shown babies whose mothers breast-fed them enjoy many health advantages over formula-fed babies.

These include fewer ear, stomach or intestinal infections, digestive problems, skin diseases and allergies, and less risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Read full report here…. (the report was removed from the Internet.)

Hey, non-1st time Mommies out there who have been giving excuses to breast-feed your baby, its time to change your mindset now!

Its true, at least for my boys. Keatkeat didn’t get much because of my MIL’s 8 unreasonable Objections to breastfeeding, but when I insisted on breastfeeding when I had Binbin, I see that Binbin’s mental and physical development IS truly more amazing!

Its been almost a year of lying down every night on the completely worn out mattress. My boys’ mattress still looks good when its untouched but when you step on it you know the foam in it is in a terrible state.

How could it not be when it has been seasoned so many times with vomits and urine!? Yes we are pathetic, we let them sleep on those horrible mattresses, where the germs and bed bugs rest alongside with them.

We didn’t buy earlier because Binbin still have accidents occasionally at night, his urine overflowed even when he had his XL diapers on. Guess his flow was way too fast and too much for the diapers to meet his standard.

After one week of completely dry diapers in the morning, we knew it was time to get rid of their *urgh* mattresses. With the additional perk from the government last week, the Growth Dividend of $200 given out to all Singaporeans in celebration of Singapore’s exceptional economy growth last year, makes it even easier for us to afford better ones for them.

Everyone was happy, la…la..la.. we went home and in less than20 hours, Binbin realised that he is not used to sleeping on a mattress that smelled so good, he preferred the stinky old smell…..

My 3 year old was lying on his purple flowery mattress, while I applied cream to stop the itch on his bottom. I wonder if mosquitoes do selective thinking on the area of which the victim should be stung before they finally decide to poke into the skin. Well, I think they do, ‘cos Binbin always get them on his bums.

So there I was happily chatting with the little guy while rubbing my index finger around his bouncy little ass. Then nature’s most wonderful fountain appeared right before my eyes. It was yellowish, it shoots far, landed on his pillow, it was just centimetres away from his left ear, the flow was strong, was definite and showed no signs of stopping!

Look at the picture and just imagine the boy lying down (not standing) and the flow went the opposite way and you have got the exact scene I was staring at!

I was shouting “stop, Stop, STOoooooP!!!!”…it was an unreasonable demand, it was beyond his control to stop…But I want him to stop!

It came too sudden, I wasn’t fast enough to react…I was sitting there as if a kungfu master has just tapped on my you-cannot-move pulse, fully conscious but was numb all over.

Allan and I looked at each other, we wanted to scold, we couldn’t, we laughed. We laughed at the short life span of the new smell of the mattress, we laughed at the direction the urine went. Imagine, I could have had an urine-facial treatment done directly from my beloved son’s little pipe.

The pillow was soaked through and so was the bed and his body. So it was ‘Get-to-work’ at 9am in the morning with lots of washing and sunning and blowing with the hair dryer….

See my little bottle of Febreze? That’s the hero of the day! Spray on the stinky-stinko area before you sun or blow dry. As the water evaporates, the chemical brings the smell along with it. Can’t imagine what would my life be without it. *muack*

Binbin’s response to the mess he created? “Mummy, look, I got 2 eggs down here….” squeezing his God given reproductive system when we stripped him naked and ran off in his birthday suit, acting crazy………Where’s the remorse? *eyes rolled*