Breastfeeding improves IQ and academic abilities, specifically reading and mathematics skills in children up to adolescence, promoting higher school performance than peers of the same age who were fed formula. This is what a study from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom suggests, published in the journal Nutrients.
Breast milk makes the difference
It supports growth, not only physical but also mental development. It appears that infants breastfed at six months show a higher IQ that positively translates into learning quality and the expression of academic abilities, benefiting both humanities subjects like reading and language, and scientific skills, including computation. The finding is scientific and stems from a British study that sought to verify potential associations between breastfeeding at six months of age and a wide range of neurocognitive outcomes extending into late adolescence.
The results suggest that, despite demographic and social influences, more than 40 outcomes—including improved academic skills cited above and higher IQ scores—can be “fed,” or more accurately enhanced, by breastfeeding. It also emerged that breastfed children tend to shift toward right-handedness by age three and a half, assessed through tasks such as holding a toothbrush or a spoon, confirming associations noted in prior studies aimed at the same goal. The current study also helps clarify some inconsistent findings, which oscillated between suggesting potential benefits and possible placebo effects or opposing hypotheses, largely due to small study samples or different measurement tools used.
The current evidence
There is robust evidence in the literature on the benefits of breastfeeding, including a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Belarus, which reported improvements in verbal IQ, vocabulary, writing, and reading abilities within this particular group of children, with outcomes persisting into adolescence, although behavioral differences between the intervention and control groups were not observed.
Moreover, numerous systematic reviews would support the association between breastfeeding and higher IQ, in some cases extending to executive functions, cognition, and behavior, though typically to a lesser degree. Regarding the duration of breastfeeding, it seems that at least six months is the minimum period to “secure” these potential benefits for the child, compared with observational studies suggesting even broader effects.
A Scottish study of 177,000 children, for example, highlighted fewer learning difficulties among breastfed children, while studies on Japanese and Australian cohorts reported reduced developmental delays and better linguistic and intellectual outcomes. Nevertheless, despite consistent IQ findings, investigations into other neurocognitive consequences based on large data sets remain limited and require further exploration.
The current study
The greatest potential effects of breastfeeding for a minimum of six months on IQ were observed specifically in working memory, such as the ability to repeat nonverbal items, by age eight.
This study used data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which enrolled more than 14,500 pregnant women in the United Kingdom and collected information via questionnaires during pregnancy and after birth, covering infant feeding data and contextual characterization, with breastfeeding status assessed at 4 weeks, 6 months, and 15 months.
Confounding factors were included to account for social and demographic influences, notably parental education, maternal age at birth, birth order, housing type, mode of delivery, and maternal smoking during pregnancy. Neurocognitive outcomes were assessed through 373 continuous measures collected from childhood to adolescence via reports from parents and teachers, self-reports, and direct tests administered by trained staff.
The researchers applied a two-phase statistical screening process, initially requiring an unadjusted p<0.0001 and then an adjusted p<0.001 for significance. Among more than 11,300 mothers who replied to the six-month questionnaire, 28.7% were still breastfeeding, 24.4% had never breastfed, and 46.9% stopped before six months (therefore excluding those children from the study). Of all the neurocognitive measures considered, 42 showed significant adjusted associations. The most notable findings in this group of children were consistently positive IQ scores, with higher verbal, performance, and full-scale IQ at ages 8 and 15, averaging gains of about 4.1–5.1 IQ points.
Reading ability also showed solid associations across several measures, including national assessments, while associations with spelling were weaker. Finally, in linguistic aspects the results were mixed, but significant improvements were observed in pragmatic conversational skills at nine years, as measured by the Children’s Communication Checklist. In summary, breastfed children achieved better mathematics performance according to both teacher assessments and national tests, while associations for science did not reach the stringent significance threshold (p<0.001). Behavioral benefits were modest, though breastfed children exhibited lower hyperactivity and lower activity levels in preschool years.
In conclusion, strengths and limitations
The evidence appears to support the potential for breastfeeding for six months to promote a higher IQ, specifically better performance in reading and mathematics, improved fine motor and conversational skills, with weaker associations for behavior and personality traits. Thus, six months of breastfeeding has been consistently associated with long-term cognitive advantages in this cohort, with no evidence of harm.
In particular, the improvements in pragmatic language by age nine provide novel evidence. Among the study’s strengths are: a population-based design, objective teacher and standardized test data, and adjustment for multiple confounders, including parental education levels.
Among the limitations are attrition, a predominantly European white cohort that limits generalizability, reliance on continuous outcome measures, and the possibility that stringent statistical thresholds (p<0.0001 followed by p<0.001) may have masked some genuine associations. While causality cannot be confirmed, the findings support promoting breastfeeding as beneficial for children’s neurocognitive development.
Source
Goulding N, Northstone K, Taylor CM et al. Differences in neurocognitive development between children who had had no breast milk and those who had had breast milk for at Least 6 months. Nutrients, 2025, 17(17), 2847. Doi:https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/17/2847
Abbonati a Karla Miller
