We do not know very well what motivated the authors of this study to carry it out, perhaps a mother with a baby hooked to the breast was somewhat more aggressive than usual, or perhaps there was simply the hypothesis and someone wanted to know if it was true.
The fact is that researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles have carried out a study to know how mothers behave when they have to defend or have to defend their babies depending on whether they breastfeed, bottle feed or if they are Women who still don't have children.
The conclusion they have reached is that breastfeeding mothers protect their babies and protect themselves more aggressively than other women, as if breastfeeding brought out a protective instinct in the style of moms wolves.
In the study, which appears in the September issue of the magazine Psychological Science, 18 mothers who gave breastfeeding, 17 women who gave bottles and 20 women who were not mothers yet participated (a fairly small sample, certainly). The researchers realized that the cause of this increase in aggressiveness could be a reduced blood pressure in nursing mothers.
This would make the typical response of the body to a situation of stress, whose mission is to help reduce the restlessness and try to calm the woman, is lower, making it increase the value to defend their children and themselves.
Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, one of the authors of the study, commented on the following:
Breastfeeding has many benefits for the health and immunity of a baby, but it seems that it also has a little known benefit for the mother ... perhaps it provides mothers with protection against many stressors that new mothers face at the same time It gives them an extra boost of courage if they need to defend themselves, or their babies.
This plus of aggressiveness, however, was explained from the defensive point of view. A mother won't go out looking for problems in the street nor will he look forward to doing so by breastfeeding his son, but if he sees himself in the position of having to defend himself or his baby, he will have more courage to do so.
The authors of the study speak of it as a benefit, although I do not dare to point it out that way, just as I would not call it detrimental. Perhaps the only thing that occurs to me is to ask nursing mothers if have noticed an increase in aggressiveness when breastfeeding or not. Right now, thinking of my wife, it could be that she was more impulsive and somewhat less rational since we had children, but of course, I don't know if she would be equally if she hadn't breastfed them.
What do you think?
