Using mothers’ responses to questions about their neighbourhoods as well as independent observer ratings of the streets where the millennium mums live, I created two summary scores of local environmental quality to see if these were associated with breastfeeding .
The evolutionary theory of life history belarus rcs data suggests that animal physiology and behaviour patterns across a fast-slow continuum, with fast life histories favoured in harsher environments, typified by, for example, short lifespans, early maturation and reproduction and having several offspring. I wanted to see whether breastfeeding, a key marker of parental investment, was also responsive to environmental circumstances.
I predicted that better local environmental quality would translate into higher initiation and duration of breastfeeding and suspected that the more subjective measure based on mother’s own environmental perception would be a stronger predictor. I found that it was actually the independent neighbourhood assessments that more robustly predicted breastfeeding behaviour – for each unit increase in objective environmental quality, mothers were around 1.5 times more likely to initiate breastfeeding and around 10% less likely to stop breastfeeding in any given month.