How long do you want your baby to breastfeed or have the bottle?
How will you teach your baby to drink from the cup?
What do you do about nipple-feeding when she starts on solid foods?
What about nipple feeding when she eats family meals?
At first, breastmilk or formula is more important nutritionally than solid foods, so you keep on nursing or bottle feeding along with solids feeding.
Later, your baby will eat more solid foods and take less breastmilk or formula. Then, the solid foods are nutritionally more important, and you stop breastfeeding or formula feeding at mealtime. Instead, you offer a cup.
Here is how you get from the nipple to the cup to the table:
- At first, give the breastfeeding or formula-feeding before the solid foods. She will like the spoon best if she isn’t hungry and wanting to nurse.
- After she learns to eat cereal from the spoon, give half the nipple feeding, then the cereal, then offer more nursing, if she wants it. She might be full.
- She will work her way through lumpy food to pieces of soft table food. Offer her sips of breastmilk or formula from the cup.
- Soon, she will finger-feed herself at family meals. Give her breastmilk or formula from the cup. Let her lose interest in nipple feeding at mealtime.
- Offer her big-girl, sit-down snacks at set times between meals and at bedtime. Snacks might still be a breastfeeding or formula-feeding. The changes are sitting down and structure. Don’t let her nurse at odd times or carry a bottle around.
- When she is eating family food at mealtime and is a year old or more, you may give her whole pasteurized milk in her cup instead of formula.
Starting juice:
Wait to start juice until your baby can drink from a cup. Give juice in a cup, not in the bottle. This is the time for starting to get off the bottle. Putting juice in the bottle keeps her on the bottle.
