As a mother of two children, the first not breastfed (for a variety of reasons which I will explain below) and a second who is currently breastfed, I fully believe that many elements of temperament are innate in a child. My firstborn is a very high strung, intense little girl. From the moment of birth she did not have any patience for breastfeeding. I tend to have low supply and slow letdown to begin with, and this situation, after 2 1/2 frustrating weeks of trying to get her to latch, every feed wound up with her screaming and batting at my breasts, me eventually dissolving into tears, and a bottle at the end of an emotional 30 minutes of trying (I did this every 1.5 hours for 10 days straight – the emotional effects on me were horrendous). After 2 1/2 weeks of this I completely gave up even trying as it was too traumatic for both of us. Even fully bottle fed, my daughter had a fuse of about 3 milliseconds in which she turned from a contented happy baby to an extremely hysterical, hungry child. At 3 years of age she is still a very demanding, fussy child who needs a lot of structure, a lot of reassurance and a lot of guidance.

My son, who is 3 months old, has happily nursed away on my low-supply, slow letdown breasts since his birth in July of 2008. Due to supply issues that have not resolved no matter what I tried, I have had to supplement after each breastfeed with a bottle and he has happily accepted whatever feeding method was presented to him. Even when hungry, he will even nurse for a long time on empty breasts which has been a good thing to help increase my milk supply (increased yes, but still not adequate for 100% exclusive breastfeeding).

My daughter never put up with the low supply situation and my son happily did. My daughter has always been a much more high strung child which has been evident from birth and there’s no amount of breastfeeding that would have “fixed” her anxiety problems. I believe it was my low supply problem (and slow milk coming in – took 10 days) combined with her innate personality that prevented her from breastfeeding in the first place.

So in my mind, this begs the question – is this study examining correlation or causation? Are babies that can breastfeed successfully just more calm and patient by nature, or is it the breastfeeding that made them that way?