How nany of you got rid of trhe bottle by 12 months and is it the end of the world if you don't?

[Sullwah]

My twins are just 10 months old.

I am doing a mix of BLW and jars (I cant face making up puree!) and have a 30 min limit on all meals ie. they can play with food and eat a bit of puree and after 30 mins meal time is over. They are still taking three good bottles a day and so I am relaxed about how much food they actually manage to consume during the 30 mins.

I am just worried about switching from bottles to beakers for milk as that will reduce their milk consumption (they are terrible at drinking much water from the beaker). And with a reduced milk consumption I will worry about how much they manage to eat and I will turn into one of those mothers (like my own) who chases their kids around the house with a spoon in their hand for hours after the meal should be over .

So when did yours stop the bottle and should I care?

ps - I never let them sleep with the bottle and have started to brush teeth before bedtime

CrushWithEyeliner

It's because toddlers who drink too much milk do not have much of an appetite for food so do not exercise their speech muscles enough by chewing.

Possibly some of the children I saw were walking around with bottles in their mouth for a large part of the day, almost like a dummy. I don't know this for sure but if it was the case then it's the same as a child who doesn't talk much because the dummy is constantly in the mouth, except it was a bottle teat instead.

I believe the difference with BF is that a child who is BF for comfort tends not to consume large volumes of milk whereas with a bottle they drink quite a lot during the sucking for comfort.

I think you either have to stop the bottle early while they don't remember or leave until they are older and do a deal with them or whatever. I have done it both ways -all fine and normal(ish) now.

Ohhhhhhh, I see now, I thought it was literally the bottle and teat thing, not the amount of time the bottle spends in the mouth. Makes so much more sense now, I have never thought of it like that.....

My twins are 15 months old and still on bottles, tried them with sippy cups, but will not take there milk out of them, i think they get there comfort from the bottle !!

I got rid of bottles at 12 months, partly because it was the guideline, and partly because I couldn't be bothered with the hassle of cleaning them all the time - much more fiddly than cups.

I found that ds struggled to drink out of a spouted sippy cup, so got him a basic free flow cup which worked much better. It took him a few weeks to get used to it, but now at 21 months he drinks most things out of a normal cup or mug and just has a cup with a lid at bedtime when he's tired and more likely to spill.

My DD is 10mths and I can't imagine that we will have got rid of the bottle by a year.

DS on the other hand was easy as he refused to drink from it after 11mths

I always try to ditch bottles by 12-14 months. Their food intake just ups accordingly. Ditch one a month and if they seem OK, go for the last one (usually the bedtime one!).

It's much easier to get a 12 month old off the bottle than a 24 month old - the older the get the more passionate and emotionally attached they become to them.

DD1 (pfb) was of course off bottles at 12 mths to the day as that was advice given. Then spent the next few years trying to wean her off anyway up cups instead and finally managed by 4yrs. May have been easier to continue with bottles for a bit longer than change to the cups. In fact her teeth are quite badly spaced and crooked but not sure if this has anything to do with the anywayup cups.
DD2 3yrs and gave them up with her own decision. Just seen dentist and teeth are perfect.
DD3 16mths still on three a day and have no intention of stopping. Where I live now kids have bottles as the norm until 3 or 4 and I do not see generations of badly spoken, badly teethed children.
I think as long as they are not sucking bottles full of juice all day there is no harm and this idea of 1 year is just another British obbsession.

We've finally just got rid of the two bottles of milk DS had a day at 2.6 - I kept worrying about it but at the time it suited us all - the deciding factor was that the very last teat we had fell apart (helped by DS chewing it) and I thought thats it I'm not buying any more. He drinks a lot less now its in a beaker (he's had other drinks in beakers since he was quite small) but eats even more - which just dosen't seem possible sonsidering he is so slight!!

I got rid of the bottle at 12 months for Ds - much easier than I thought it was going to be, with those basic tommee tippee beakers. He went from being a bit of a milk monster to eating much more and just having milk as drinks from a cup during the day. Not a problem with DD as she was bf til 11 months and went straight to a cup. She hates cows milk anyway and never drinks it. (Interestingly this has not resulted in her having bandy legs or crumbly teeth - she seems to get her calcium ok from yoghurt and cheese!). I think it's up to you how you want to do it - I was just fed up with having all the bottles and stuff around, plus his nursery preferred not to do bottles after a year.

i have not yet a dysfunctional adult due to prolonged use of bottle or/and dummy.

yet met, i meant

KTNoo, it's also about encouraging the development of mature sucking and eating patterns.

Drinking from a bottle with a teat requires an immature forwards-backwards movement of the tongue which us adults don't do (have you ever tried drinking from a teat on a bottle? - it's hard because we have developped mature sucking patterns).

I believe it is this immature action that can have an affect on children's speech development.

Obviously, in many cases it doesn't!

As ktnoo says, constantly sucking on a dummy or bottle would probably have more affect than just the odd drink from a bottle each day.

ps. My 2 dcs stopped bottles by about 14months and I stressed over it beforehand. It actually was very easy after all my worry!

Er, well I tried every cup on the market with the first baby and had them all hurled away in disgust.

I can still remember taking her to kindergarten aged 3 with the shameful bottle firmly clutched in her hand.

She's 10 now and has perfectly straight, filling-free teeth.

Number 2, aged 13 months, will now drink water from a cup and I am hoping to move on to getting him to take milk from a cup over the next few weeks.

But I'm not going to agonise over it if it doesn't work.

I got rid of ds1's bottle at around 12 months. I reckoned it would be easier (for me!) than when he was a tantrumming toddler. After 3 days he was happy using cups.

Will do the same with ds2 (10 months). I've swapped his afternoon bottle for a cup, will do the same with the breakfast one soon, and the bedtime one will be gone by 12 months.

DD graduated to a sports bottle.

Panicpants and ohreindeer - likewise!

I felt that 12 months was long enough to be Doing Bottles, so got rid of them perfectly painlessly. I didn't much enjoy the palaver of bottles, and I've never liked seeing older children with bottles (just a personal opinion, not a judgement). I didn't go for liddy cups, either (again, I just don't like them). I started using the tops of the bottles as miniature cups instead.

But if it's agonising, I wouldn't worry about it. They grow out of everything when they're ready. I wasn't concerned about the effect on their teeth (if I had been, I'd have stopped DS sucking his thumb, which he still does at night!! Unfortunately it's harder to detach a child from a thumb than from a bottle...)

My DS came off the bottle at 11 months but it wasn't particularly easy give it a a week and many many different kinds of cups.

He is now a2.5 and I cannot gte rid of the bloody Avent Magicup! So was a bit pointless really as it basically the same thing but with a spout.

But he's happy and that's only for milmk at bedtime BTW the rest of the time he drinks from a normal cup/cup with straw thing.

my son stopped outright drinking from a bottle at 10 months...jsut refused....but ate 3 square meals a day so I got calcium into him in yoghurts and by making mash with small amounts of cheese etc. He would not drink from a hard sippy cup until 15 months. When he was 11 months I found this www.nubysippycup.com/ scroll down for pic. It has a silicone spout much closer to a bottle and he started drinking milk again, eventually going on to a harder cup. He still drinks from his cup before bed so has loads of milk, but it on a real cup in the day.

DD was over 2 yrs old when we made the switch from bottle to beaker. She had no problems because of it, as confirmed by the dentist who checked her six months later.

When possible, brush her teeth after the bottle, though.

DD is 17 months. Still has evening bottle of milk which don't intend to give up anytime soon- she is sleepy then and it's part of the routine.
Tried to give up morning milk bottle a few weeks ago- used to have it in our bed before her breakfast but she wasn't that fussed. Tried her with a beaker (Avent) and she flatly refused to use it (although will happily drink water out of it..)
Now have given up with that and just give her a beaker of milk with her breakfast which she is starting to drink. Most people I know keep the bedtime bottle for a long time.

My DD never had a bottle - she was exclusively breast fed, except for when I went out and left her (mostly with my mother) when she drank formula from a little cup. I honestly cannot remember when my mother first gave her a little drink of formula, but I guess it was before six months.

Anyway, DD was happily drinking formula/water and, from 11 months, cows milk from a cup at a year old. She never used any kind of sippy cup. So it perfectly possible for babies to manage small cups.

My ds dropped his bottle on his second birthday, he was drinking for a sippy cup at 1yr but still wanted the botttle for comfort at bed.

We went cold turkey with the bottles as he was drinking several pints of milk a day! His teeth are fine.

When you decide to drop the bottle make a big thing about getting a new cup for them. I bought my dc those cups that have a sort of cow pattern on them and said that was their special cup for their milk. They loved them and dropped the bottle without a second thought.