Researchers have found that those who are breastfed for at least four months as babies are 30 per cent less likely to exhibit a range of behavioural problems when they start school. Such problems include anxiety, clinginess, bad behaviour such as lying and stealing, as well as being hyperactive. Critics of such studies, which many fear stigmatise those who do not breastfeed, say that mothers that do tend to be older, better educated and better off. But the researchers said their findings, reported in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, were after these differences had been statistically taken into account.
