American adults are generally infatuated with coffee, but does the love affair extend back into infancy? A team of doctors at the Boston Medical Center sought to find out. 
 
 Between May 2008 and November 2010, the researchers, led by Dr. Anne Merewood, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, enrolled 450 mothers and newborns into a two-year study on child-feeding practices. Each mother received regular telephone check-ins, and was twice queried by a research assistant in-person when the infant reached one and two years of age. Among the questions asked at the two-year check-in was, "Does your child drink coffee? If yes, how many ounces per day?" 
 
 Of the 315 mothers who completed the year 2 survey, 48 (15.2%) admitted to feeding their children coffee on a regular basis, at an average rate of roughly an ounce per day. 
 
 While that prevalence may seem surprisingly high, it cannot be generalized to the broader population. Because the survey was conducted at an urban hospital in the heart of downtown Boston, it suffered from a high degree of sampling bias. Almost 80% of the mothers in the study were not born in the U.S. Most were Hispanic. Merewood noted previous studies showing that people in Hispanic cultures tend to start drinking coffee at earlier ages. 
 
 But is infancy too young? The fact is we just don't know -- almost no research exists. The researchers did uncover a lone study, however, which found that 2-year-olds who consume coffee or tea between meals or at bedtime were more than three times as likely to develop kindergarten obesity. 
 
 It's not coffee, itself, that's the primary concern, of course; it's the caffeine it contains. An in-depth 2009 review made plain the severe dearth of research on the effects of caffeine on children. Since then, the situation has slightly improved, bringing to light some worrying correlations. 
 
 "Caffeine use among children and adolescents has been associated with depression, sleep difficulties, [being] overweight, substance use, and concerning physiological, behavioral, and psychological effects," the researchers wrote. 
 
 Writing at LiveScience, pediatrician Dr. Sanjay Mehta says that ideally, children under 12 should not be consuming caffeine, but recognized that kids aged 4-6 can safely consume 45mg of caffeine, equal to one can of Coke per day, and teens can consume 100mg, roughly three Cokes per day. 
 
 Merewood and her co-authors would love to see more research performed on coffee intake in kids. 
 
 "In general, more studies should be conducted to look at coffee drinking in young children, its associations, the reasoning and/or cultural practices behind the practice, and the unique risks..." 
 
 Source: Laura Burnham et. al. "Breastfeeding and Coffee Consumption in Children Younger than 2 Years in Boston, Massachusetts, USA." J Hum Lact. 2015 Feb 12 

 Abstract 
 
 Background: Although introduction of inappropriate foods and liquids in early childhood and their association with breastfeeding is commonly reported in US children, coffee use in very young US children and its association with breastfeeding is not. 
 
 Objectives: This study aimed to determine the proportion of 1- and 2-year-olds in an urban population consuming coffee, their rate of consumption, and predictors of consumption, including breastfeeding status. 
 
 Methods: We used data from a prospective cohort study on infant weight gain and diet, and body mass index at age 2. We used bivariate analyses to examine variables associated with coffee consumption at 1 and 2 years and multivariate logistic regression to control for variables of interest. 
 
 Results: This study included 315 mother-infant dyads. At 1 year, the rate of coffee consumption reported was 2.5%; at 2 years, it was 15.2% and average daily consumption was 1.09 oz (range, 0.01- 4.00 oz). The only characteristic associated with coffee consumption at 1 year was breastfeeding at 1 year (P = .0275), which did not remain significant after controlling for confounding variables. Variables significantly associated with coffee consumption at year 2 were lower maternal education (P = .0016), non-US maternal place of birth (P = .0015), maternal Hispanic ethnicity (P < .0001), infant female sex (P = .0495), and receiving any breast milk at 1 year of age (P = .0189). After multivariate logistic regression, maternal Hispanic ethnicity (P = .0139) and infant female sex (P = .0371) remained significant. 

 Each week, MyHealthNewsDaily asks the experts to answer questions about your health. This week, we asked doctors: Does caffeine harm kids? 
 
 Roberta Anding, Registered Dietitian, director of sports nutrition at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston and member of the Baylor College of Medicine Faculty: 
 
 Yes. There was actually a position paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics published in May this year. There are all these new energy drinks, and the position paper said these kinds of products and high caffeine loads are not appropriate for children. 
 
 A study that came out in December 2010 in the journal Pediatrics found that 75 percent of children consume caffeine on a daily basis, and the more caffeine children consumed, the less they slept. Caffeine impacts slept, but this study showed that the old wives tale that it causes bedwetting wasn't substantiated. 
 
 There's also some evidence to suggest that if you have a child who already has an anxiety disorder, the effects of caffeine make it worse. 
 
 The other concern that I see is how parents equate sports drinks and energy drinks as the same thing. Often time the energy drinks often have significantly higher amounts of caffeine than soda. 
 
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 Dr. Marcie Schneider, adolescent medicine physician and former member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on nutrition: 
 
 It is bad. 
 
 Caffeine is absorbed in every body tissue. It increases your heart rate and it increases your blood pressure. Caffeine changes your body temperature and your gastric juices. It changes how attentive you are, and can really cause trouble in terms of sleep. 
 
 Then there's moods. For some people, caffeine enhances their moods. For others it makes it worse. For kids who have some anxiety, and it may even be under control in normal conditions, caffeine can really increase anxiety. 
 
 Caffeine is a stimulant, and therefore it may change their appetite. Adolescents gain half of their adult weight in their teenage years. If caffeine curbs their appetite in some way it could affect their growth. 
 
 A lot of the issue for kids is all the energy drinks such as Red Bull and Monster. These drinks are full of other components. There's guarana, which is a plant extract and each gram of guarana is equal to 40 milligrams of caffeine as a stimulant. There's another protein called taurine, which potentiates the effect of caffeine. 
 
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 Dr. Nicole Caldwell, assistant professor of pediatrics, Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio 
 
 It's not really good for them. As far as the FDA goes, there are no current guidelines for caffeine consumption. 
 
 But the Canadian government has some guidelines. For children aged 4-6 years, the maximum recommended intake is 45 milligrams a day — about as much caffeine as found in a 12-ounce Diet Coke. 
 
 Caffeine affects the central nervous system as a stimulant. The brains of a child tend to be a little bit more sensitive to caffeine's effects than the brains of adults. Caffeine can cause them to be hyperactive, which is obvious. But it also can make them nervous, anxious, worsen stomach problems and create sleep problems. 
 
 Also if they have an undiagnosed arrhythmia, an irregular or abnormal heartbeat, caffeine increases excitability within the heart, which can exacerbate the arrhythmia. 
 
 Caffeine also constricts blood vessels. It takes 4 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight to increase blood pressure. 
 
 The evidence doesn't show that caffeine stunts growth. But if kids are drinking soda, even caffeinated tea throughout the day, they may not be taking in the amount of calcium they need. 
 
 Also, if your child is drinking a can of caffeinated soda, they are also taking in a lot of sugar, which has the second effect of tooth decay, and the growing issue of childhood obesity. 
 
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 Ann Condon-Meyers, a registered dietitian at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh 
 
 Yes. It's a stimulant, so it's a drug. 
 
 The amount a child weighs changes the dose-response. In other words, a 60-pound child could handle 60 milligrams of caffeine in 24 hours. The problem with that is one Mountain Dew has 50 milligrams, and so does 8 ounces of most energy drinks. 
 
 Side effects include increased heart rate, increased blood pressure increased anxiety and decreased ability to sleep. They will suffer withdrawal effects just like adults if they don't have it, at the very least a headache. 
 
 To exacerbate the problem of these caffeinated drinks is the fact that many of them are in high in sugar. That's poor nutrition. When you have a kid who is drinking more than one sugary drink a day, it's a set-up for obesity. 
 
 The earlier your obesity begins in childhood, the more likely it is to follow you in adulthood. And drinking sugary caffeinated drinks is habit forming. I really fault the beverage industry for marketing to children. I think they're very clever to put caffeine in a drink because it's habit forming and it's a drug. 
 
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 Dr. Matthew Keefer, General Pediatrician at Children's Hospital Los Angeles 
 
 I would say at best it's no harm, at worse, it can cause a lot of side effects that aren't necessary. Certainly, young children don't need any caffeine at all. If an older child has a cup of coffee or a soda every once and a while it's not a big deal. 
 
 But when it comes to energy drinks, there's no role for them in pediatrics. If you're using these for working out or to enhance athletic promise, it's not a drug for that. 
 
 What happens is some kids use them in replacement of good hydration, which is worse. Caffeine can cause you to lose more water. 
 
 We do use caffeine in young infants if they're having trouble remembering to breathe. Occasionally it's used for some people with migraine headaches, but beyond that, there's no medical use really. 
 
 There's a reason why caffeine in the form of coffee is one of the highly subsidized corporate perks. It keeps people alert and working. But it's a problem if you're talking about teenagers who need a lot of sleep. They probably need a good 8 plus or 10 hours a night, and teenagers as whole tend to get a lot less sleep. Many use caffeine to stay awake, and using a drug to make up for a deficit and it isn't good.
– Toddlers may not be your typical Starbucks clientele, but at least one study suggests a fair number know how to enjoy a cup of joe. The study was highly specific and thus probably can't be applied to the general population, Real Clear Science reports: It dealt with about 300 moms in Boston, about 80% of whom weren't born in the US and most of whom were Hispanic—and other studies suggest Hispanic cultures drink coffee younger, notes the lead Boston researcher. Even so, the results in the Journal of Human Lactation may come as a surprise. Some 15.2% of respondents said they routinely gave their 2-year-olds coffee. That's 48 mothers giving their kids an average of an ounce of coffee daily. But questions remain over what kind of damage—if any—that could do. "Almost no research exists" on the subject of caffeine consumption in young kids, notes Real Clear Science, though the researchers found one suggesting that 2-year-olds into coffee and tea faced triple the risk of kindergarten obesity. Five doctors interviewed by LiveScience for an earlier story all warned against allowing kids to drink much caffeine, with the most lenient of them saying, "At best it's no harm, at worse, it can cause a lot of side effects that aren't necessary." The bottom line, says the Boston researcher, is that more study is needed about the coffee-drinking habits of the very young and the particular risks involved. (And then there's the danger of spills.)