Moms Talk: Is taking a bottle from a baby proactive or pushy?

A new study suggests that it’s time we started to wean our 13-month-old son off of bottles, sooner rather than later.  According to new findings published in the Journal of Pediatrics, 2-year-olds who drink from bottles are more likely be obese when they enter kindergarten.

Researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia cautioned that they don’t know for sure that there is a direct correlation between toddlers who drink from bottles developing into chubby children, but they suggest that their work may give parents extra incentive when it comes to pushing baby to part with a bottle.

One in five children in the study were still drinking from bottles at age 2, either all the time or at night. And by the time the children reached age 5, one out of five of the 24-month bottle-users was obese.  Meanwhile, incidence of obesity among children who had stopped using bottles earlier was one in six. Those children who had trouble kicking the bottle habit were 33 percent more likely to be obese.

Add those findings to the long-held notion that bottles – particularly when used  overnight – lead to cavities, and the decision seems like an easy one. At least until parents try to put it into practice.

As our daughter, who is 3 ½, moved up through the ranks at daycare into the room where all the babies were on their feet, she seemed to be one of the last holdouts with her bottle. We’d put her lunch in the fridge every day and see that gradually every other tot’s bottles were being replaced by jaunty sippy cups emblazoned with various Sesame Street or Disney characters. Meanwhile, Lucy was still drinking from her leaky Avent bottles.

I don’t remember exactly how old she was when we pulled the plug on her bottle days, but I remember that it seemed to be more about her parents being ready to make the move – we had to steel ourselves for a fight. It took one weekend of being firm about our house being a no-bottle zone. She drank sips here and there from her new sippy cup on Saturday, but by the end of the day Sunday, she caved in the battle of wills and never looked back at her bottle again.

Yet, she seems to have been so much older than our son is now to try that move with him. He has been reliably chewing real food for only about a month so I know he’s still getting a lot of sustenance from his bottles. And when we place a sippy cup on his tray at mealtime, he flips it upside down to dot milk all over his tray like he’s blotting out numbers on a bingo card. As a member of his pit crew, I find that behavior so frustrating that I give up and take away the cup. There it is again – the parent getting fed up before the child.