I know there are a million articles and studies out there about breastfeeding, but I just read this one and thought it was interesting. I know it is just one study but reading it really took off a lot of the societal pressure I feel that I need to breastfeed.

"Colen analyzed three samples: 8,237 children, 7,319 siblings and 1,773 “discordant” sibling pairs, or children from 665 surveyed families in which at least one child was breast-fed and at least one other child was bottle-fed. The children who were differently fed in the same family represented about 25 percent of the siblings in the data."

"As expected, the analyses of the samples of adults and their children across families suggested that breast-feeding resulted in better outcomes than bottle-feeding in a number of measures: BMI, hyperactivity, math skills, reading recognition, vocabulary word identification, digit recollection, scholastic competence and obesity."

"When the sample was restricted to siblings who were differently fed within the same families, however, scores reflecting breast-feeding’s positive effects on 10 of the 11 indicators of child health and well-being were closer to zero and not statistically significant – meaning any differences could have occurred by chance alone."

And I like the takeaway:

“If breast-feeding doesn’t have the impact that we think it will have on long-term childhood outcomes, then even though it is very important in the short-term we really need to focus on other things,” she said. “We need to look at school quality, adequate housing and the type of employment parents have when their kids are growing up.

“We need to take a much more careful look at what happens past that first year of life and understand that breast-feeding might be very difficult, even untenable, for certain groups of women. Rather than placing the blame at their feet, let’s be more realistic about what breast-feeding does and doesn’t do.”

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/sibbreast.htm

Not trying to start a heated debate - just sharing a study.