GCSE success is not reliant on breastfeeding – stop shaming mothers

This week, the news has been dominated by a landmark study claiming that breastfed babies perform better in their GCSEs. Apparently, the longer a baby is breastfed, the higher their eventual GCSE grades in English and Maths will be.

Even the timing of this study – while hundreds of thousands of families up and down the country are fraught with the stress of exam time – seems to exemplify just how much every action of a mother is scrutinised.

Imagine all the mothers who opted for bottles 16 years ago frantically worrying if they have caused the educational downfall of their child now. 

As a mother, I’m fed up with blame being placed at our feet.

Sure, being breastfed might have a positive correlation with GCSE success, but that is also likely due to breastfeeding historically being far more prevalent among middle-class parents.

It is societal inequality, rather than mothers, we should be addressing if we want to solve this attainment gap.   

Perhaps breastfeeding itself does lead to academic success, but I believe we should instead focus on more pressing factors that are major indicators of a child’s educational achievement.

For example, a recent study by Manchester University found that social class contributes more to pupil progress, than the amount of time spent doing homework or revision. 

In other words, even the time a lower income family might spend with their child doing homework and other educational pursuits cannot outweigh the overwhelming influence of a parent’s social class, wealth and education on eventual attainment.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, pupils on free school meals perform significantly worse than their peers at every stage of school – and this gap has barely moved over the past 15 years.

So why then are we so eager to pin something as complex as success in life, on something as arbitrary as the milk a baby consumed at just a few months old?

Society – and parts of the media – never misses an opportunity to judge and control the choices of women, and especially mothers. 

Whether that’s people uploading judgemental posts on social media about mothers not quieting their screaming babies in public, or politicians placing pressure on women to have more kids without accounting for the socioeconomic factors that make starting a family a privilege akin to owning a house these days. 

Why can’t they see that mothers have it hard enough already in the UK at the moment?

Despite the country’s rapidly declining birth rate, which is causing concern to many, mums are too often left to deal with the challenges of parenthood alone without adequate support.

Despite 1 in 5 women experiencing a mental health problem during pregnancy or the first year of their baby’s life, the NHS is failing to meet its targets on maternal mental health support, with an increasing number of women falling under the radar. 

At the same time, childcare costs rose more than £2,000 between 2010 and 2021, meaning that more and more women are being forced out of work in order to care for children. A recent Careers After Babies report found that 85% of women leave full-time work within three years of having their first child despite 98% wanting to return to work after becoming mothers. 

And to top it all off, mothers remain some of the most impacted by the cost of living crisis – with as many as 3 in 10 single mothers regularly skipping meals to provide for their families.

If you want these women to stretch themselves even further – just to make sure they breastfeed their child on the chance it may help them 16 years later – you’re dreaming.

Eighteen months into breastfeeding my child, I can attest to how much of a challenge it can be. 

I also had the stress of figuring out which was least difficult – trying to express milk at work or starting to wean my son instead and dealing with the pain of mastitis while trying to teach a class of 30 kids.

I feel breastfeeding is portrayed as being like having two ready-made, unlimited bottles of milk strapped to your chest everywhere you go but in reality it’s a lot more all-consuming than that.

So of course, there are a number of reasons why breastfeeding might be more common in certain social classes.

But instead of distracting ourselves with studies that risk putting shame and guilt on women, we should be focusing on how we can make motherhood more accessible and fulfilling for women. 

We should be trying to close the inequality gap so that all children can succeed academically, whether they were breastfed or not.  

That could mean better benefits for those who have to give up work or mandatory flexitime for all working mothers.

I know first hand that motherhood can be harder and lonelier than ever – the last thing we need are studies shaming us for the difficult choices we make in the early weeks and months of our child’s life.