What to give instead of a bottle?

[TeethingBabyHelp]

Hi all
My DS is turning one soon so I'm doing some reading on making the switch to cows milk. He has it in his porridge at the moment and is often trying to slurp my milk when I have cereal so I'm not worried about taste being a problem.
However, I've just read on Nhs website that drinking from a bottle should be discouraged from 12 months old. DS uses a beaker for his water - is that what I should be using for his milk too? He finds his beaker quite exciting (I don't know why) and I can't imagine this helping with wind down time for his milk before bed!
What do you use for milk feeds after 1 please?

Thanks!

Mine were on sippy cups from 6 months. Bottles should be binned well before 12 months!!! I too have friends still giving bottles to children aged 3 and 4. Outrageous!!!

Hazelnut pie, the dentist on this thread is probably more relaxed about very limited use of bottles precisely because of his/her experiences seeing actual patients.

Public health advice is based on the lowest common denominator. The people who work in public health see some bad issues caused by overuse of bottles (toddlers dragging grubby bottles around all day and sipping on them all night, tooth decay caused by drinking from bottles at nighttime, toddlers not getting onto proper meals because parents find it easier to keep handing out bottles and pouches to keep the kid quiet in the pram/car seat, toddlers over-consuming cow's milk in bottles and getting anemic...just C&Ping the above!). They also know that the kind of parents who allow their children to get into the above habits, tend to be people without high levels of education who struggle with things like reading comprehension, and who are likely to have difficulty reading/understanding/remembering complex nuanced messages like "It is OK to use a bottle a little bit, providing that.... blah blah blah." So the safest and simplest thing is to just boil the advice down into a super-simple easy-to-remember slogan like "no bottles after 12 months."

Same with everything else. Baby walkers are fine if you use them a little bit and supervise carefully, but complicated statements advising people how to do this, may not be read or understood properly by precisely those parents who are the most likely to do daft things like leave a baby stuck in a walker for half an hour while they go and cook dinner in another room. So it's safest to just say NO BABYWALKERS. Yet many people do use them in a very limited way without problems.

Cups-only from six months should be fine for a BF baby who is getting most nourishment from the breast (my baby had an open cup only--from five months! She wouldn't drink from a bottle), but if a fully FF baby was on cups-only from six months, I would be a little bit "huh?" Babies generally do not drink as much from cups as they do from bottles (that is indeed part of the reason why it is recommended to bin or strictly limit them after 12mo), so if a 6mo FF baby were on cups-only, I would be concerned that they might end up not taking enough milk. Bottles are also a source of psychological reassurance to very young babies, just like the breast is.

I seem to remember that Gina Ford book nagging on about how parents should give only cups to babies right from very soon after they started solids at 6mo, and my feeling was that she was perhaps basing her recommendations on old-fashioned weaning schedules that held sway many decades ago (where the baby by 6mo was mostly on "jars" with hardly any milk--and probably cow's milk, at that).

There is room for a sensible middle ground here.

@Hazelnutpie and you’re still wrong to assume that any parent is incapable of making decisions that are different from the part line, and yet still do so in a way that causes no home. I am not “advocating bottles”. I’m saying it has been possible, in my experience, as a moth and a human, to give one bottle a day without any adverse effects. Where have I suggested that bottles of milk be consumed frequently at the exclusion of other dietary components and risk to speech and language development. There’s a huge difference between public health advice and support to individual families. If there were more of the latter a recognition that different humans need different strategies, and that is possible without causing harm, parenting would be so much easier.

We stopped using bottles at 12 months because, well, there’s no reason not to really.
We switched to a weighted straw cup initially then just a normal open beaker at around 15 months.

@kokeshi123

You said: The dentist on this thread is probably more relaxed about very limited use of bottles precisely because of his/her experiences seeing actual patients

As I pointed out, I have worked with small children having a full dental clearance. This wasn’t an occasional event, we used to do a list once a week. This experience was also seeing actual patients. In the U.K. we have a poor record for tooth decay in children!

Children’s teeth are very precious and as parents we should all do our very best to protect them. Children don’t need bottles. Babies need to suck milk children can eat food and drink from cups.

Research shows that 12 months is the ideal time to switch completely. Once a child of this age moves onto a cup they forget their bottle very quickly. As @bonzo77 likes to baby her three and a half year old, perhaps this is a case of doing what she wants, rather than what’s best. Having said that, it’s her choice but as a professional she should watch what she’s saying on a parenting forum.

Tooth decay was the most common reason for hospital admission for children aged 5 to 9 years in 2014 to 2015

I can promise you that not a single child having a dental clearance will be doing so with a single daily bottle of milk being the only risk factor for their levels of dental disease.

From my practice I know that the public health message is the starting point. The lowest common denominator or once size fits all advice. I also know that people are more likely to follow advice that they can make work for them. Can we really expect all children to have no sugar EVER? No, I tell parents to limit it to meal times only and never between meals. Can we expect parents to NEVER co sleep? No, we advice on safe bed sharing. When as professionals we dish out best practice advice that is impossible to follow, we risk ALL the advice being discarded. When we offer support so that families do the best they can, I find that we get real damage limitation. I work with very underprivileged families (recent immigrants, asylum seekers, socio-economically deprived central London). In the last year I have referred 1 child for XGAs. They were a new patient whose teeth were already beyond saving. There’s a bigger picture. About individuals and their families and circumstances. One bottle a day doesn’t cause tooth decay. Unattainable, rushed, generic, judgemental advice does stop families seeking care.

You’re just not getting this @bonzo77.

On a parenting forum, it’s not ideal for a dentist to be banging on about bottles and older children. Do what you like but do try and take your professional responsibility more seriously.

@Hazelnutpie. And you are not getting what I’m saying. There is public health advice. And there is individual support. There’s a lot of overlap. But they’re not always the same. If they were everyone would just look at NHS Choices and not come here.

Please don’t tell me to “take my professional responsibility more seriously”. You have literally no idea of my attitude. I get the idea that you have a somewhat inflexible approach. This is something I have seen before amongst practitioners in secondary care (you working in theatre suggests you fall into this category). You may not get the opportunity that I do to see whole families (all the siblings, 3-4 generations, extended family) and to see the bigger picture. You see the end point of years or even generations of poor dental education and care. You see them when it’s already too late. I’m mostly keeping them from needing the service you work in.

I'm done!