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Originally Posted by jarynsmom06  I think your class depends on how hard you want to work for something, not whether you were breastfed or not. You can grow up in a lower class and still make something of yourself and end up in a higher class.
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Maybe, maybe not. This is certainly the ideology most Americans believe. I remember I had a heck of time convincing my white middle-class Anthro 101 students in the midwest that America is a class society at all -- most of them insisted on parroting the "Everyone has equal opportunity" and "Poor people are poor because they are lazy" cliches.
More to the point, this study was done in England, starting in the late 1930s and following people as they grew up and grew older through the rest of the 20th century. England has a very specific and rather unique social class structure, which is quite different in many respects from America's. And the 1930's to the year 2000 was a specific and unique historical era. The next 70 years will not, cannot be the same in terms of the forces impacting education, employment, housing, savings rates, etc etc.
If the study is valid, then it can tell us that children born in the late 1930s in England were socially advantaged by breastfeeding. It cannot explain why -- even the news articles are clear about that. It definitely cannot say more broadly that breastfed children throughout history in all societies have been more upwardly mobile. Social class does not work that way. It is a dynamic phenomenon, always changing, and always produced by and reproducing some form of inequality.
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