What To Do When The Baby Rejects His Bottle? – Being Parents
There can be many different reasons for not breastfeeding your baby. Maybe the mother wants to go back to work or she has to go out for a few hours… During this time, the little one cannot stop eating. It is therefore essential that he feeds from a bottle.
Sometimes the baby rejects his bottle because it is an object he does not know. So that you don’t have to find an emergency solution, it’s a good idea to prepare your baby for the transition. And if you are planning to stop breastfeeding your baby, you need to make the transition a smooth one.
My baby rejects his bottle. How to help him?
Not all babies reject the bottle, but it is a difficult transition for most of them. The longer he has been breastfed from his mother, the more difficult it will be to adapt. This is why it is important that the change is not too sudden.
There is always a good time to stop breastfeeding your baby, but parents don’t necessarily have time to wait. Sometimes it’s urgent. For example, if the mother returns to work and she cannot breastfeed her baby during the day, someone else needs to bottle-feed her. To avoid finding yourself in this situation, it is better to anticipate and accustom the child to the texture of the pacifier. He will be less surprised by the change.
With simple experiments, we can make the transition less difficult. In addition, specialists advise the mother to get help from another person. This allows the child not to associate the bottle and the breast. If his mother is bottle-feeding him, he will wait in vain for someone to breastfeed him.
Our advice to facilitate the transition from breast to bottle
It is not an easy transition. Sometimes the problem is that the baby rejects his bottle, not that he does not want to leave his mother. Some mothers sometimes advise waiting until the little one is hungry. But if that doesn’t work, all you have to do is give it gas. Also, if the baby continues to reject his bottle, you will have to breastfeed him.
Specialists advise the mother not to be present when the baby tries to drink from a bottle. If you already know that you are going to have to leave it with someone else, you should try to prepare it for it.
Other tips you can follow:
- The main thing is to give your baby a balanced diet. This means that it should not have any nutritional deficiencies. In order for this not to happen, the transition must be smooth, very slowly.
- Feed him sometimes from the breast, sometimes from a bottle. Alternate methods. Remember that it is important not to cause emotional trauma to the baby. This is why everything must take place in serenity. We also want to prevent mothers from having milk retention problems.
- If the baby senses, sees or hears his mother’s presence, he is more likely to reject the bottle. It is for this reason that pediatricians advise to entrust the child to another person and temporarily separate him from his mother.
- Sometimes the baby rejects his bottle because he does not like the taste of the milk that is given to him. Care must be taken with the preservation and characteristics of the milk. For example, powdered cow’s milk is difficult to digest.
- It may be the pacifier he rejects. We can try to change it or to feed the child with a spouted glass or very small spoonfuls.
- One effective way to get her used to the bottle is to wait until she shows less interest in the breast. We can then stop breastfeeding and switch to a bottle. In this case, it is the baby who decides when he is ready to change.