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TH🍼Bottle Refusal is rough. But there is a way through it for many babies!
As a feeding therapist and lactation counselor, these are the first things I do when addressing bottle refusal.
1. A thorough feeding and oral motor assessment. Knowing what nursing typically looks like and assessing your baby’s oral motor skills can be the make it or break it of bottle refusal. It’s important to ensure there are no structural or coordination issues that may be impacting baby’s ability to successfully bottle feed. And seeing how your baby feeds on the breast can give crucial insight into what bottle and approach may be best.
2. Bottle Selection based on the above assessment. How your baby nurses and what your milk flow is like can help determine what bottle may be best.
3. Breaking down the skill of feeding from the bottle. Typically, if baby is refusing the bottle, it’s because they legitimately do not know how to feed from it. Sucking is the primary reflex at birth, but as baby gets older, new reflexes emerge. Munching, tongue thrust, those reflexes get stronger around 3/4 months, which can then make learning to suck on something other than the breast more difficult! It’s why you may notice your baby just munching on the bottle. So, we need to help baby learn to suck instead! And, to do this, we need to break down the skill of feeding.
Baby can’t form a coordinated suck-swallow-breath pattern without first latching on the bottle nipple and achieving a consistent suck!
So, we take the bottle nipple off the bottle and start there. We need baby to work on latching to it and sucking first before we can expect them to coordinate actual feeding!
⭐️In the midst of Bottle Refusal? Comment “link” for the link to my Bottle Refusal Guide!
This newly revamped guide gives you tons of information AND personalized support. Embedded in the guide is a link to questionnaires that I will personally review and then provide specific recommendations for your baby!
If there’s one thing I have learned, a personalized approach to bottle refusal is always best and my guide does just that!
#bottlerefusal #bottlefeeding #newmom #infantfeeding
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