Episode 89: 8 Ways To Help Baby Transition From Breast To Bottle

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

Welcome to the kids sleep show, where we help tired parents from around the world to get their children to fall asleep independently, sleep through the night and build healthy sleep habits for life. I’m your host, Courtney Zentz. Now let’s sleep together.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the kids sleep Show. I’m your host, Courtney Zentz, the founder of tiny transitions, sleep consulting. And I am coming to you today from our last weekend at the New Jersey Shore in a city called brigantine, New Jersey. So if you hear some beautiful seagulls in the background, it is a sunny degree, a sunny 70 degree day here and I am excited to get this podcast all sorted so I can go enjoy some time with my kiddos. What I’m talking about for this week’s episode of the kids sleep show is actually going to be something that is near and dear to one of my clients current struggles. And I just got off the call with a client who is struggling to make the transition with their four month old from the breast to the bottle. So they have had limited success in doing so. And so I thought it would be the perfect time to share an episode after our talk today on all the great advice I gave them because I am a lactation counselor as well as a sleep consultant and wanted to share that same great advice for you if you are also trying to make that transition. And you are struggling. So first things first, I’m going to talk with you today about eight things you can do to help ease the transition from exclusively breastfeeding to introducing a bottle into your routine. The first piece of advice that I’m going to give you is to give yourself some grace, this may not be a one time solution, that may be something that you as a parent have to work towards, in getting your baby to take the bottle, have patience, be consistent and know that over time, after several tries, they will warm up to the idea and they will start to take the bottle. There’s no right or wrong time to introduce the bottle in my opinion, I am a lactation counselor, I’m also a sleep coach. And I’m a mom. And I’ll tell you depending on which hat I’m wearing, I try to give the best scientific backed education around sleep around lactation and really around doing you. Okay, the day my kids came home from the hospital, they both had a bottle, and I breastfed them for a year. Right? There was no right or wrong, it was just that I wanted to make sure that frankly, I had some flexibility. And that my husband could also feel like he was a part of the transition to parenting when a lot of that responsibility falls on a woman. So you know, my husband wanted to be involved. So we made the family choice to introduce that bottle right away. And we never had any issues. Most of my clients don’t have any issues when they do that. But everybody has a different preference on when they want to do it. And depending on when you choose to introduce that bottle, there may be some different challenges depending on how long it is until you do that. So we’re going to talk through what those challenges are. And ultimately how you get baby to take that bottle to do so happily and to free yourself up from being attached to them about every three hours, that whole first year of life. So the first thing you want to do is make sure that you are starting to offer the bottle before baby is ravenous, right, you want to make sure that you’re catching them when they have an appetite, right, but also catching them before they’ve hit the hit the point of crying where they’re hungry. So you’re going to start before they’re ravenous, typically, for the whole first year of life about two hours and 45 minutes would be a real acceptable time to start offering that bottle and see how they do and taking it because again, at that point, they will be hungry, but won’t quite yet be at the point of meltdown from really needing to eat out of that hunger. Okay, the next thing you can do or the second tip I advise is going to be having your spouse or relative, a friend appear an older sibling of the family, whoever it is, that’s not you to give the offering of that bottle and to have you not necessarily be around whether you leave the house or you just leave the floor. You know having a baby stare at you when they want your nipple and stare at that nipple going. It’s not yours, you know, you want to give yourself the best shot for them to take the bottle. You also want to look at the environment. Sometimes things can be very, very stimulating to a baby who’s trying to focus and take a bottle, it’s new to them as well. You have to remember a bottle and a nipple function is very different than the nipple of your actual breast. So you want to take that into consideration when your baby’s trying to learn and offer them a place of calm and quiet. You also want to look at different positions so sometimes baby if they’re used to going down for your breast in the same position right either doing a cradle holder or a football hold, you would probably not want to do the same hold when you are doing the bottle because baby’s going to expect your breast and they’re going to get this piece of plastic, right? So, you know, rubbery plastic nipples are not the same feeling as, as your breast is, neither is the number of places that milk shoots out up. Okay, so definitely try changing the positions around I know, one of the things that was super successful for us was, my husband always seem to have our little ones flipped forward. So they would be facing forward and kind of looking out around the room and get somewhat distracted by the room. And they would actually take the bottle at that point, right. Versus you know, the obvious advice before that which was sometimes kids are too overstimulated, that you want a place of quiet, every baby is going to be different from a sensory standpoint, you’ve got to figure out what gets them in the best place to be open to taking the bottle. Okay, the next thing you want to look at is the flow of the nipple. So when I have clients who are introducing a bottle straight away, but they don’t want to have a preference for the nipple, meaning that baby goes, wait, I can get this much faster than I can get it from the breast, I’m going to stay with the bottles, right? That would be where I’d suggest you use a premium nipple. But if you have a baby who’s between about four and six months of age, and you’re maybe heading back to work, and you’re trying to introduce them to a bottle, my suggestion would be that you look at a regular size flow or the next size up because they could be initially sticking it in their mouth and then spitting it out because they’re like, this sucks, there’s no milk coming out.
So definitely playing with the different flows and the different nipples from the bottle. I think honestly, it’s it’s more of a flow issue. And it’s more of a fueling issue than it is like the fact they see the bottles. So you know, I would definitely start and take a look with the flow. Now, obviously different bottles have different layouts, different features, different kind of design, if you will, there’s really three different bottles, I’ll give you my number one as far as the bottle that I find the most parents have success with in the transition from breast to bottle, and that’s the lansinoh baby bottle. So that’s probably from a number one perspective, the bottle I find that parents have the most success with followed by the Komodo bottle, which is a little bit smaller, have a nipple size and they do sell a pink and a green one. I don’t think you know, baby looks at and goes, Hey, it’s green, that’s not your nipple. Right? They can obviously tell it’s different. But the Kobo tomo has some great reviews and have had great success with my clients trying that one, as well as the Mimi jumi. So that one actually looks like a nipple, they have colored it to mimic the skin and the nipple is smaller, a little bit more realistic looking to a nipple. So those would be the top three now. Again, my number one is the Lancer. Now I would say that the camo tomo probably has the best of the reviews, if you will. And then maybe Jimmy looks the most like the breast but can be a little more expensive. So that would be the order in which I would give those a try. Now again, my kids like to Dr. Brown’s bottles, but we also did it from day one home from hospital. So they didn’t know any better. Every bottle could potentially work for your child, don’t just go out and buy these because I’ve told you to it’s just, you know, those are my suggestions from not only a lactation standpoint, but also from the sleep perspective of a sleep counselor, a sleep coach and you know what I see in the clients that I work with every day. The next thing that you can try is a balance of what I call splitting the difference, right? It’s a pacifier with a medicine dropper on the backside of it right, so they sell them at CVS and target. It’s basically going to be in the baby section of the store. And it’s going to look like a pacifier. But it’s essentially a medicine dropper. So that can be a great way to have them introduced to getting something that’s not from your nipple, and doing it in slower quantities, right because it looks to the baby like a pacifier, but it functions where it holds milk on the backside of that pacifier. So you can make sure that you’re making that transition. And I’ll post a link to one in the show notes if you are curious and want to take a look at what that looks like. And the final piece of advice I would give you is to top baby off after their feeding with a bottle that way again, they’re not ravenous, maybe they’ve eaten off one breast instead of two. So they’re balanced, but they still have some room for milk. I would encourage you to try to introduce the bottle after that. But you could do things like introducing the bottle while wrapping it around a T shirt that might smell like mom. You know, again, having mom step away or having mom see if she can be the one that introduces the bottle. Every baby’s different. You never ever know. Nor am I going to tell you it’s going to 100% be this way it’s going to take this many times. What you really want to do is balance, consistency and Trying and know that you may have to try different things at different times in order to ultimately see that success. My advice for you first is to give some of these tips of try over a couple of days. And if you’re still struggling join me out my facebook group. It’s called slumber Made Simple. It’s a free sleep community. I’m out there every week doing live Q and A’s and answering questions by team the slumber squad is out there. They are a team of amazing sleep consultants all over the United States who help families like yours. And we would be very excited to have you in the group but also to be able to coach you to success when you are trying to introduce a bottle to your baby. Don’t stress, you’re working hard and we are here to support you every step of the way. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode. Until next time, leave the rest to us.

Hold on one more thing before you go. As a valued listener of the kids sleep show. I want to help you build a great sleeper not just in the times you’re listening to the show. But all day every day. Every week of the year. I have a new Facebook group called slumber Made Simple. It’s a place together with other parents looking for sleep support, laughs and the latest in sleep research to build a family that is rested and at their best day in and day out. If you want to be part of the community where you can get free sleep support, weekly training sessions, unbelievable fun tips and so much more. Head on over to tiny transitions.com forward slash community. That’s tiny transition stuff comm forward slash community or head over to Facebook and search slumber Made Simple. drop me a note and let me know when you join. I can’t wait to see you there.