Nursing Your Kids

First the good news. When I first heard about dental caries and looked at the terrifying pictures (check out the pictures on this website to scare yourself silly) I made an immediate decision to cut out night nursing all together. Of course Sam was not fond of my decision and rebelled, dragging me down with him. We didn’t actually cut out night nursing until Sam started sleeping through the night, and even now on, the nights when he wakes up, I still nurse him back to sleep if he asks for it.

But now I can breathe easier, because a new study has found no link between nursing and tooth decay in young children. Researchers studied the infant feeding habits and other family characteristics of 1576 children between the ages of 2 and 5. Though they found no relation between nursing, no matter how long the duration and tooth decay, the study showed that poor children and Mexican-American children were at severe risk for tooth decay and children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy and after were at an increased risk.

To protect your child from tooth decay brush their teeth and schedule their first dental appointment six months after the first tooth emerges. Ask Moxie has a great post about dental hygiene with great product advice. Parenting Children also has a video post about baby bottle tooth decay.

And now for the bad news. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia found that exclusively nursing babies with a history of family allergies such as food allergies, asthma, and excema can increase the chances of the child developing allergies later in life. Though children were protected up to the age of seven, they have a greater chance of becoming allergic in adolescence or adulthood. The study also found that breastfeeding doesn’t protect children from non-allergic families from developing allergies.

Dr Matheson said further investigation was needed to determine why there was an increased risk of developing asthma after seven years of age.

“It could be that mothers are passing antibodies on to their babies or because of increased hygiene and reduced exposure to infections early in life,’’ she said.

“The breastfed children in our study had fewer bacterial and viral infections, were more likely to be first born and in a higher social class – these all factors related to increased hygiene.”

Dr Matheson said the study’s authors acknowledged there were many benefits of breastfeeding and were not suggesting that women with allergies should not breastfeed.

“However, if you are concerned about preventing allergy in your children, it may be more effective to implement other strategies such as not having carpet in your home,’’ she said.

image by all in green at flickr