Helping your tot move on to a Cup!
One of the toughest steps for a baby or toddler is moving on from the breast or bottle to a drinking cup. It is hard to know when the “right” time is to make this change, however most experts say the earlier the better.
Have a look at this information from the NHS guidelines on Drinks and Cups: http://www.nhs.uk/Planners/birthtofive/Pages/Drinksandcups.aspx
Using an open cup or a free-flow cup without a valve will help your baby learn to sip rather than suck, which is better for their teeth. Comfort sucking on sweetened drinks is the biggest cause of painful tooth decay in young children. If you use a bottle or trainer cup, don’t put anything in it other than formula, breast milk or water.
It’s important to choose the right kind of beaker or cup. A beaker with a free-flow lid (without a non-spill valve) is better than a bottle or beaker with a teat. Drinks flow very slowly through a teat, which means that children spend lot of time with the teat in their mouth. This can delay speech development and damage teeth, especially if they’re drinking a sweetened drink. As soon as your child is ready, encourage them to move from a lidded beaker to drinking from a cup.
BornFree has developed a range of toddler cups that grows with your child in 3 easy and fun stages.
Our Training and then Drinking cups feature the BornFree Venting System that allows a free flow of liquid and reduces vacuum build up. The free flow aspect is extremely important in children’s oral health and speech development as well as reducing the risk of middle-ear infection. (BROWN & MAGNUSSON “On the physics of the infant feeding bottle and middle ear sequela” 2000).
Finally there is the Twist’N Pop spill proof straw cup, for ages 2+, which incorporates a hygienic pop up silicone straw and venting mechanism for comfortable drinking.
We are offering you a chance to win all 3 of the BornFree toddler cups!
All you have to do is:
Share your tip for helping a toddler move on from the breast or bottle to a cup.
You can either leave your tip as a comment after this post or over on our Facebook Fanpage wall.
You can leave more than one comment with a tip, each comment will be counted as an entry.
The winner will be chosen at random (via random.org) and announced on Weds 30th March.
You have until midnight Tues 29th March to leave your tip.
Good Luck!
UPDATE: 30/03/11
And the winner is….. Lorna K!!! Congratulations and thank you for your brilliant tips- 11 in total!
We’ve also picked a runner up who will win a Twist N’Pop for their little one…. well done to Joanna, who entered via our blog
I helped my kids transfer from bottle to cup by always giving them water in a cup they never had anything but milk in a bottle
to transfer from milk in a bottle to in a cup I would give them a drink of milk in the day in their cup with their meals, and only gave a bottle at night, eventually they preffered the cup to the bottle i always found something with a soft but different shaped spout a good starting point and then transfer to something with a solid spout.
go for a soft spout first then transition on to harder spout. Going straight to a harder spout will be too big a change for the baby at one go.
I found the best thing to do was to introduce the cup with water in it early in the process of introducing solids, while they’re still getting all their nutrition from milk then it’s a low pressure approach.
Once they’re happy to drink water from a cup then start trying them with milk, 1 feed at a time… My approach has always been slowly slowly low pressure… If you try too quickly you end up getting stressed, the baby gets stressed and then everything just gets harder…
Let the baby expirent and play with the new cup with a little water in it to minimise spillages. It will make it easier if the baby has seen and chewed on the cup already before introducing juice or milk in it. Just giving it to them straight away will be daunting as babies don’t like change much.
Never introduce a cup if your baby is teething or unwell as it will most likely be rejected by the baby as they will want their milk in the usual way.
I always introduced juice or water in a cup before milk. As my baby was very passionate about getting his milk from a bottle. Once he was used to using the cup I introduced the milk.
Once you are ready to introduce milk in the cup do it in stages. My son adapted well to his afternoon milk in a cup for a few days. Then his morning milk for a few days and then bedtime milk for a few days until he was having all 3 milk feeds from the cup.
[...] recently asked BornFree mums to share their tips for moving babies and toddlers on to a cup and here’s some [...]
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