IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/restat/v95y2013i3p919-931.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Breastfeeding and Children's Early Cognitive Outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Donna S. Rothstein

    (U.S. Boreau of Labor Statistics)

Abstract

This paper investigates whether breastfeeding affects 5- to 6-year old children's cognitive development using three U.S. longitudinal data sets. The results for the full samples roughly point to a dose-response effect of breastfeeding on children's cognitive outcomes, with breastfeeding six months or more associated with about one-tenth of a standard deviation increase in cognitive test scores. The breastfeeding effects do not appear to be due to differences in maternal employment, cognitive ability, or parenting skills. In contrast, within-sibling results show no statistically significant breastfeeding effect. (No rights reserved. This work was authored as part of the Contributor's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. law.)

Suggested Citation

  • Donna S. Rothstein, 2013. "Breastfeeding and Children's Early Cognitive Outcomes," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(3), pages 919-931, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:3:p:919-931
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00282
    File Function: link to full text PDF
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Conti, Valentina & Kopinska, Joanna, 2018. "The role of parental cognitive ageing in the intergenerational mobility of cognitive abilities," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 38-47.
    2. Resul Cesur & Joseph J. Sabia & Inas Rashad Kelly & Muzhe Yang, 2017. "The effect of breastfeeding on young adult wages: new evidence from the add health," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 15(1), pages 25-51, March.
    3. Bolbocean, Corneliu & Tylavsky, Frances A., 2021. "The impact of safety net programs on early-life developmental outcomes," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    4. Bar-El, Ronen & Hatsor, Limor & Tobol, Yossef, 2020. "Home production, market substitutes, and the labor supply of mothers," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 378-390.
    5. Julia Hatamyar, 2022. "Workplace Breastfeeding Legislation and Labor Market Outcomes," Papers 2209.05916, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    breastfeeding; children's cognitive development;

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:95:y:2013:i:3:p:919-931. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kelly McDougall (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.