Formula & whole milk - help!?

[Chewbecca22]

Hi - really confused by the whole milk transition..!

Baby just turned 1 this week - not a huge eater but having 3 meals, a snack or two, plus 3 bottles of formula (8oz). He has water with his meals and drinks that fine out of a sippy cup.

We have tried whole milk and he isn't a fan.. just spitting it out. He does eat a lot of cheese and yoghurt and likes porridge so gets milk in that but I'm worried that he just won't be full enough if we don't do formula too? Do we just.. stop?

I have tried mixing formula and whole milk and he drank that but its still 8oz which seems like a lot to be having on top of food and if 4oz of that is whole milk each time.. thats loads??

Help me out here... panic/spiralling!

The reason that the recommendation is to switch to whole milk at 1 year old is because typically most kids have started eating reasonable amounts of solid food by then, and so no longer need a nutritionally complete formula to meet all of their nutritional needs. Giving lots of formula can reduce their appetite and thus their propensity to eat real food too. But there's a balance to be struck, and generally a slow transition to cows milk (often by mixing with formula and then gradually shifting the ratios until it is just cows milk) tends to work better than an abrupt switch. I don't think most just-turned-1 year olds are exclusively on cows milk.

We switched gradually from formula to milk at 1. So 75:25 for a few days, then 50:50 for a few days. Then 25:75 for a few days. Just so the taste isn't too much of a shock. He still has morning and evening bottles at 15 months, but volume of morning one is reducing down quite quickly. This is our 3rd baby and the pattern has been the same for all 3. I suspect he'll drop his morning milk quite soon, but we plan to keep the evening one for a while yet. Just follow your baby's lead. From age 1 it's just a drink, don't view the milk as a meal anymore. So if your baby doesn't want it, just make sure you offer water as replacement (and of course throughout the day as you normally would).

I have kept my dc on toddler formula ages 6 and 3 now as both have sensitive digestive systems and food issues due to autism and it’s a massive part of their calorie and fluid intake each day. Even if they didn’t have the issues they do I’d probably have used formula till 2/3 years then stopped

My daughter has a dairy allergy and didn't engage with weaning at all until 13 months. Prior to this she ate the odd spoonful of food each meal often nothing. She was on 3-4 5oz bottles and a 8oz bottle a day. By 20 months she was eating 3 meals and the odd snack with a 5oz, 8oz and 3oz bottles of formula a day. By 2 weeks transitioned each of those bottles to oat milk. She's 3 now and has 2x 3-4oz cups of oat milk during the day and 6-7oz of oat milk in the evening. On good days 3 meals on bad days 1 meal.

We gradually switched by mixing formula with cows milk. I don’t think we were fully off formula for a few months after 1 year but we did have a few tubs of stage 3 milk brought by mistake that we could use up. I might have sped up the process if we hadn’t had these.

Did you still do formula? Or just cut that completely even if they didn't take milk?

He's had one mixed bottle with half formula and half milk and has thrown up so we will just do formula for his bedtime bottle and do a different ratio tomorrow

Ah that's a good shout - we have a little bit of stage 2 formula left and hoped it would be a quick and easy switch but that was naive! Might get some of that just in case

He definitely eats more than he used to and some days he devours food and other days he licks some toast! It's maybe time to drop the middle bottle and see if that helps food intake?

I’m I don’t think stage 3 formula is needed at that age, even stage 1 is fine if you are gradually weaning off formula. We just used the stage 3 as DH brought it when he didn’t know there were different types and it seemed a shame to waste it.

I'd reduce each bottle to maybe 6oz rather than drop one entirely if he's still not eating a lot. That'll slightly reduce the milk by almost the same amount.
Don't worry too much about adding in cow's milk if he's eating the cheese and yoghurt