baby suddenly refusing bottle

[HazleNutt]

DS is 9 weeks old. From about 6 weeks, we have also been offering ebm from a bottle about once per day or couple of days. He didn't have any issues, took the bottle straight away and was equally happy to feed from both breast and bottle.

A couple of weeks ago I had to take some medication that meant I could not bf for 3 days, so he was fed only from bottle. Still all fine and went back to breast without any issues.

But now he will suddenly no longer drink from the bottle. Will not even try to suck, but either chews a little or simply starts screaming when we try to bottle-feed. Only way I can get him to take the bottle is when I offer breast first and then stick the bottle in quickly - once he is sucking, he will happily drink the whole bottle. But won't accept it otherwise.

Now obviously there's not much point in bottle-feeding if I have to be there anyway - so any ideas how we could convince him to accept the bottle again? We've tried the usual suggestions about only Dh feeding the baby, different positions, feeding when DS is sleepy etc, but nothing works.

Hi -

I'm afraid we had a similar(ish) problem with DD & DS. DS never accepted a bottle again but with DD it was just a matter of waiting till the right time. Between 8-12 weeks she just refused (initially getting upset, then as weeks progressed she just played with the teat and refused to suck). Then one morning she seemed particularly sucky (can't think how else to describe it!). Sucking her hands and her clothes. We tried her with a bottle and bingo!

The other thing looking back which I think hadnt helped was that she happily took the newborn flow teat and her refusal coincided with us moving up to a 1 month + teat. I think that being BF meant she sucked much harder (though I could be making that up) and she ended up having a couple of incidents where she sort of choked on the milk, which I think put her off. At 12ish weeks when she went back to taking a bottle again it was with the newborn, slow flow teats.

Good luck!

thanks - fingers crossed it's just a phase. We haven't changed the teats and the same one was totally fine 2 weeks ago. Have now bought pretty much every teat available just to see if he likes one of them better.

My LO did same thing so I changed from a slow flow to medium flow teat & that workked for me :)

just to update, in case someone else has the same problem - changing the teats worked. I must have tried a dozen of them, the silicone ones were spit out immediately, latex ones chewed a bit. What did the trick for us was NUK First Choice, no complaints and was accepted immediately. I'm very relieved!