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You want your baby to be smart

[The unbonded] are never able to want anything without also wanting to be the center of attention, never able to devote their minds singly to the problem before them when part of them still craves the mindless euphoria of an infant in the arms of someone who solves all problems. They cannot wholly apply themselves to the use of their growing strength and skill while part of them longs to be helpless in arms. Every effort is in conflict to some extent with an underlying desire for the effortless success of the beloved babe.

Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

“Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.”

William Goldman, The Princess Bride

There are many infant and child intelligence scales used in the scientific and medical communities.

The primary scales are the Bayley Scales of Infant Development, The Differential Ability Scales, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, III, the Stanford-Binet (Fourth Edition), and the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities.

All of these scales assess what is popularly known as IQ, though different scales call IQ different things – for instance: Composite Score, Composite Standard Score, General Conceptual Ability, General Cognitive Index, etc. Unfortunately, there are no studies that test two matched groups: one composed of babies born without interventions (as typical of midwife-attended home births) and the other composed of babies born with interventions (as typical of hospital births).

Scientific studies have been performed, however, on 1) the relation of intelligence to bonding time, and 2) the relation of intelligence to feeding method. Because midwifery and medical models are at opposite ends of the spectrum on these issues, these studies do shed some light on the problem of choosing between the two models of care.

Parental bond

A significant amount of research indicates the importance of a close parental bond with the newborn.

As we saw in Reason #10, “You want to bond with your baby,” science tells us that physical contact, particularly in the first year, has a positive effect on children’s health and well-being. Infant intelligence, an indicator of health, has been found to be closely correlated with a strong parental bond, specifically skin-to-skin contact in the first few hours after birth.

What exactly is it about skin-to-skin contact that can elevate an infant’s intelligence in only a few hours? How can touch so profoundly affect the infant brain?

Touch is associated in an inverse way with something called “serum plasma cortisol levels.” Cortisol is a steroid hormone secreted by the adrenal glands in response to stress. The more touch, the lower the levels of cortisol. The less touch, the higher the levels of cortisol. When plasma cortisol levels are imbalanced, as in the case of touch deprivation, infant brain tissue develops abnormally. Such a hormonal imbalance can even result in the destruction of previously normal brain tissue.

If parental (especially maternal) touch affects the growth and life of infant brain cells, isn’t it reasonable to conjecture that infant intelligence relies on, or is to some extent a function of, touch?

This is indeed what scientific research indicates. Carefully designed studies performed over the last three decades demonstrate a clear relationship between timely, affectionate parental touch and increased infant intelligence. Researchers have found that enhanced infant learning, improved language acquisition, improved reading achievement, improved memory, improved visual-spatial problem solving, and improved IQ all result from greater mother-infant skin-to-skin contact in the first hours, months, and years of life.

As we saw in Reason #9, “You don’t want your baby to be taken away from you,” there are many reasons hospital staff use to justify taking your baby away from you immediately after birth – and for keeping him isolated from your loving and human touch for hours and even days at a time. The benefits of skin-to-skin contact and bonding are not recognized by today’s institutional mediocracy. Separation of mothers and newborns is standard hospital practice. Touch deprivation is simply “the way things are” in the medical institution today.

The midwifery model of childbirth, on the other hand, solidly grounded in both scientific research and common sense, allows a completely different scenario to emerge. If you give birth at home with a midwife, you are able to hold your baby as long as you want to, without any “professional” interference. Parental-infant skin-to-skin contact is encouraged, especially in the precious first few hours after birth. When your newborn is allowed prolonged mother-infant contact, many advantages accrue, and elevated infant intelligence is among them.

Breastfeeding

Touch is only one way nature gives Homo sapiens smarter offspring. Breastfeeding too has been shown to favorably affect infant intelligence. One of the great advantages and joys of home birth for both you and your baby is breastfeeding quietly and long, without any interference from anyone. In the hospital, your ability to breastfeed is hampered by multitudinous procedures and policies that dishonor nature’s ancient wisdom and leave your baby without your precious mother’s milk, or warm mother’s breasts, and leaves him therefore less healthy, less happy, and less able to deal intelligently with the world in later life.

Many studies demonstrate the superiority of breastfeeding to bottle-feeding in relation to infant and child intelligence. Studies consistently show that breastfed children have higher IQs and perform better academically than formula-fed children. One study, published in Pediatrics in January 1998, followed more than 1,000 children over an 18-year period. The authors concluded: “There were small but consistent tendencies for increasing duration of breastfeeding to be associated with increased IQ, increased performance on standardized tests, higher teacher ratings of classroom performance, and better high school achievement.” Another study found, after controlling for family, social, and economic variables, that early breastfeeding was associated with better picture intelligence at eight years of age, and better scores in mathematics and better sentence completion at 15 years of age.

No need to take just two studies’ word for it. Studies published in 1982, 1988, 1994, and 1996 also concluded that breastfeeding enhances cognitive development in preschool children. Studies published in 1978, 1982, 1984, 1992, 1993, and 1994 concluded that breastfeeding enhances cognitive development of children in their early school years. (The 1993 study above tested both preschool and school-age children.) Researchers found that breastfed children scored higher on both the Bayley and McCarthy scales, and the longer infants breastfed the greater were their intelligence scores. A March 2003 study published in Acta Paediatrica found that full-term infants who are born smaller than normal scored an average of 11 points higher on I.Q. tests if they were breastfed exclusively.

A meta-analysis (i.e., a study of studies) published in 1999, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concluded not only that breastfeeding is associated with higher cognitive development scores for full-term infants, but that the cognitive benefits of breastfeeding are even greater for preterm infants. Critics of this meta-analysis and of some other breastfeeding studies say that the populations studied were not randomized and that therefore the studies’ results were skewed. They say that breastfeeding mothers are often of higher intelligence and socioeconomic status than bottle-feeding mothers, and that these factors may account for the higher intelligence scores of breastfed children.

The authors of a 1992 Cambridge, U.K. study endeavored to answer this argument. They studied 300 preterm infants. They adjusted for differences in both maternal education and maternal social class. Using an abbreviated version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (revised Anglicized), they found that children who had consumed breastmilk in the early weeks of life had a significantly higher IQ at between seven-and-a-half and eight years than did those who received no maternal milk. An 8.3-point advantage was found for these breastmilk-fed infants. Interestingly, the authors found that children whose mothers chose to provide milk but failed to do so had the same IQ as those whose mothers elected not to provide breastmilk. The nonrandomness of the mothers’ process of self-selection for breastmilk feeding was thus made irrelevant when children of some of these mothers were fed formula.

The authors of a 1982 study in New Zealand went even further than Cambridge researchers in their attempts to answer hospital-birth advocates’ arguments against the breastfeeding-intelligence relationship. The authors created a meticulous study that controlled for multitudinous factors: maternal intelligence, maternal education, maternal training in child rearing, childhood experiences, family socio-economic status, birth weight, and gestational age. What these researchers found was a solid favorable relationship between breastfeeding and childhood intelligence/language development at ages three, five, and seven years. On average, breastfed children scored approximately two points higher on IQ scales than bottle-fed infants. Of course, the two maternal groups were still self-selected. But because the populations were matched, this fact should have no bearing on the outcomes. And if breastfeeding mothers are admitted to be “more intelligent,” doesn’t this say something about breastfeeding?

Many breastfeeding studies – including the Cambridge study cited above – also demonstrate that duration of breastfeeding results in an accelerated rate of increase in infant intelligence as compared to the rate of increase in bottle-fed infants. This accelerated rate remains the same whether or not randomization is used.

Reasonable persons thus echo the concluding words of the authors of the abovementioned meta-analysis:

The burden of proof should be placed on those who propose that feeding formula from a bottle can equal feeding milk from the breast.

Or in plainer words, “If you don’t respect the wisdom of nature, you’ll have to tell us why – and you’d better make it good.”

The burden of proof is always on those who seek to displace nature in favor of man-made tools, machines, and potions. As of this date, no study has demonstrated that formula feeding achieves superior results to breastmilk in any category of comparison – and certainly not in the category of IQ scores.

Realms of intelligence

Of course, IQ is not the only test of intelligence. IQ is a measure of the ability to think, while the ability to interact successfully in the world – to do – is a whole other realm of intelligence.

Dr. Arnold Gesell, director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development from 1911 to 1948, developed a model for normal infant development that measures several categories of what might be called “the intelligence of doing (among other things).” These categories are gross motor ability, fine motor ability, and adaptive ability.

Joseph Pearce writes in his book, Magical Child, of the astounding performance on Gesell tests of home-birthed Ugandan infants, compared to hospital-delivered Western infants:

I have mentioned that Marcelle Geber spent one year doing long-term studies of 300 of these home-delivered infants in Uganda. She used the famous Gesell tests for early intelligence, developed at Yale University’s child development center. The pictures of the forty-eight-hour-old child – supported only by the forearms, bolt upright, perfect head balance and eye focus, and a marvelous intelligence shining in the face – are no more astonishing than those of the six-week-old child. At six to seven weeks, all 300 of these children crawled skillfully, could sit up by themselves, and would sit spellbound before a mirror looking at their own images for long periods. This particular ability was not to be expected in the [hospital-birthed] American-European child before twenty-four weeks (six months) according to the Gesell tests. Between six and seven months, the Ugandan children performed the toy-box retrieval test. Geber showed the infant a toy, walked across the room, put the toy in a tall toy box; the child leaped up, ran across the room, and retrieved the toy. Besides the sensorimotor skills of walking and retrieval, the test shows that object constancy has taken place, the first great shift of logical processing in the brain, at which point an object out of sight is no longer out of mind (the characteristic of infancy and early childhood). This test, successfully completed by the Ugandan children between six and seven months of age, was not to be expected until somewhere between the fifteenth and eighteenth months in the [hospital-birthed] American and European child.

The myth that Western culture’s technological birth practices produce “better” babies is somewhat deflated by Geber’s findings. Western babies, instead of waking to a bright new world, in general find themselves recovering from the countless routine assaults of hospital obstetrics medicine. While home-birthed tribal infants are born clear-eyed and clear-minded into a warm, gentle world, Western babies, dazed by drugs, are yanked, sucked, or pried into being, then shocked into consciousness by cold air, cold metal, and cold water. It is no surprise that hospital-delivered babies takes several months longer than tribal-born babies to exhibit active intelligence.

Further evidence

Geber’s clear indictment of Western birthing practices is corroborated by controlled studies in the West.

In a 1993 study at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, babies’ motor skills development was found to be directly dependent on the duration of breastfeeding. The longer the babies breastfed, the better their development. In a 1984 study of 13,135 children, a positive correlation was found between the duration of breastfeeding and infant visuomotor coordination. Both mental and physical intelligence find their apogee in spontaneous creation and spontaneous nurturing. Hospital delivery, on the other hand, consistently produces comparatively retarded offspring.

Routine stupefaction

There are many standard hospital practices that interfere with the emergence of natural infant intelligence.

To name a few: 1) the supine and lithotomy positions, both of which are associated with low Apgar scores, 2) pharmaceutical drugs – especially Pitocin, which contributes to infant oxygen deprivation (see Reason #76, “You don’t want your baby to be brain damaged,” in Volume 2 of this work), and which, because it often leads to jaundice, is associated with separation of mother and child for infant phototherapy, 3) surgical procedures such as cesarean section and episiotomy, the repair work and recovery time for which lead to lost bonding time, and 4) instrumental delivery, which may lead to infant brain damage and often leads to the separation of mother and child.

Phenomenal intelligence

Giving birth at home with a midwife, you do not have to worry that your baby will be separated from you after birth. You do not have to worry that the precious bond between you and your baby will be broken. You do not have to worry that someone, somewhere, is giving your baby mind-numbing infant formula while your breasts are bursting with infant brain food. You do not have to worry that between seven and 15.2 pharmaceutical drugs will put your baby’s brain at risk.

In short, when you give birth at home with a midwife in attendance, you don’t have worry that your child’s intelligence will be given anything but the most time-tested advantages: skin-to-skin contact, bonding, breastmilk, and a pristine bloodstream.

If you want your baby to be smart, it behooves you to do everything you can to avoid the hospital locale for the birth of your baby and to seek out a midwife who naturally honors nature’s profound wisdom and phenomenal intelligence.

(The above is excerpted from Jock Doubleday's book, Spontaneous Creation: 101 Reasons Not to Have Your Baby in a Hospital, Vol. 1: A Book about Natural Childbirth and the Birth of Wisdom and Power in Childbearing Women, www.SpontaneousCreation.org)