Dana:    Hi. I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video. Today, I want to talk about bottle use, or more importantly when to stop using a bottle. I see a lot of toddlers still bottle dependent, meaning they’re having bottles of milk two, three, four times a day, and this causes a few different problems. The first problem that it causes is that a toddler’s not eating properly if they’re taking a bunch of bottles throughout the day. It’s a bit of a catch-22 because often I hear “Well, he doesn’t eat that well during the day, so I offer a lot of bottles to compensate.” If you stopped offering the bottles, he would eat more. If you’ve got a child who’s having two or three big bottles of milk everyday and is not eating very much at mealtime and snacktime, I want you to consider getting rid of the bottles.

The rule of thumb around bottle use is after the first birthday, they can go, they absolutely can. Just throw them all away. You can transition into a sippy cup. That makes the process a little easier. You can buy sippy cups that have a soft top. That’s a little bit more familiar to the child, so it usually eases them into it a bit better. You might find that your child goes on a little bit of a milk strike when you transition from the bottle to the sippy or to the regular cup, and don’t panic if this happens. That’s another really common thing that I hear parents say is “Well, I tried to stop giving her milk in a bottle and she won’t take milk.” We’ve got a two year old who will not drink milk in a sippy cup or a cup, will only drink it in a bottle. That’s what I find happens if the bottle lingers much past the first birthday. There becomes this weird relationship that milk only goes in a bottle and I won’t drink it any other way. It just becomes a bit of a habit. It is one worth breaking because no two year old needs to have bottles anymore.

If they go on a little bit of a milk strike for a few days, do not panic, they will come back to it. They most likely won’t drink as much as they did when it was in a bottle, and so just space it out different throughout the day. Instead of giving her eight ounces first thing in the morning in a bottle, just give her two or three in a cup with breakfast or put it in her cereal or add it to the snack or a little bit at lunchtime. If you break it up into little quantities throughout the day, you’ll find that they still get the same amount, it’s just not in a big bottle. What really needs to change is that food becomes the main calorie source around the first birthday and milk becomes a beverage, and that’s a hard mind shift because for so long milk was the food source, the primary food source, or formula or breastfeeding, and now food needs to come into the front and milk needs to drop into the beverage category.

If you’ve got a child that’s hitting or nearing the first birthday or maybe you’ve got a toddler into the two’s that’s still using a bottle, just get rid of them. They’re really is no way to wean off of it or transition away. Just round them up, throw them out or give them away, recycle them, and move into a sippy cup. If they won’t take a sippy cup, sometimes they’ll take just a normal cup, plastic cup, or sometimes they really get a kick out of a straw, so you can offer that as an option as well. All right?
Thanks so much for watching today. Sleep well.