Help!! 13w old refuses bottle, any advice???

[lucylev]

Hello,

Hoping to revive any advice/tips that I haven't already tried,
Desperately trying to get my daughter (13 weeks) to take a bottle. I've tried everything my milk/ different bottles/teats/other people feeding leaving her, I'm being told to perceive but it's the hardest thing ever, I should have been off to ladies day today with a bunch of gfs but had to give my ticket away, sitting here feeling abit mehhhhh wondering if She will ever take a bottle.
Any other tips j could try???

No tips, sorry, but when you say she's bottle refusing what does that actually look like? I'm trying to figure out whether my baby is refusing or just not used to a teat.

Ooh, one tip, some people say using a soft spouted cup is more successful?

I had to defer going back to work as my son wouldn't take a bottle or milk from a cup - he would take water from a cup.

Anyway, after trying loads of stuff, an older midwife recommended buying the cheap latex teats that you get from Chemist shops - took to it straight away! little sh!te :o

Definitely worth a try if you haven't already.

My 4m old dd is similar. I have practically every bottle on the market! She takes formula or breast milk out of a standard tommee tippee sippy cup when I am not there. She takes this sitting bolt upright, cup horizontal. She controls it a bit by pulling the cup towards her or pushing it away. Now getting very proficient at it.

She might not NEED a bottle. Good luck and keep trying different things.

DS1, we discovered, didn't care what sort of bottle he had but he needed to be in a position as unlike breastfeeding as possible (eg in a bouncy chair) and the milk had to be really warm.

DS2 refused any and all bottles from 3 months or so but got the hang of a Doidy cup and then a sippy cup pretty quickly around 4.5 months.

Also if persevering is really stressing you both out, you can just stop - I think I freaked out a lot over DS1 not taking a bottle (I discovered the bouncy chair/hot milk trick around 12 weeks) and as it turned out hardly ever needed him to take one: was usually able to go out for a swim or whatever between feeds/during a nap and if I went out in the evening more often or not he'd be asleep. By the time I went back to work he was drinking from a cup anyway.

Thank you all for your replies, she literally swings her head from side to side if any milk does fall from the teat into her mouth she pushes it back out of her mouth, I don't think she can work out how to suck the teats, I don't know if I should continue with one type of bottle or continuing trying her with the different ones I have

I have a Tommee tippee free flow cup I will get a soft latex teat one this afternoon. What's the difference between a doidy and soppy cup?

it was the latex teats for the bottles that we had if that's what you meant you were buying, not for a cup. he would thrash and spit out and just not suck at all when it was the harder teats that we had and we tried all those closer to nature things etc. After a while he would take any type of bottle once he got used to the latex ones which is good because they don't last and when they have teeth they can bite through them really easily!

I think the issue is that when they breastfeed they don't such as such other than to keep attached, they use their jaw to push the milk out whereas with the bottles it's a different action completely. Try the latex teats, try using expressed milk and formula as he preferred formula from the bottle as he must have associated it differently and maybe keep the teat tucked in your bra for a bit before trying it. We used a medium to large hole rather than a small as well so it came out a bit easier.

Good luck with it.

A Doidy cup is an open cup but sort of weirdly slanted so you don't need to tip it very much to get the milk out. Bit (potentially) messy but apparently the action of drinking from an open cup is relatively similar to the action used in BF.