Q. My 10 week old still only wants to be breast fed, what should I do? I’ve tried several different nipples, and bottle types. I keep wasting the milk that I pump for her because she won’t drink it. She isn’t interested in the pacifier either.”
Sucking milk out of a bottle requires different mouth and tongue movements than breastfeeding, so it may take some practice for your baby to get the hang of it. And you may have to try a few approaches before your baby is convinced.
First, try having someone other than yourself, like your husband or a grandparent or a sitter, introduce the bottle while you’re out of the house and at a time that’s a little before her usual feeding time, so she’s interested in a feeding but not frantically hungry. The reason you may want to be out of the house is that a baby can smell her mother’s milk from a long distance— about 25 feet or so- and even if you aren’t in the room, she may reject the bottle knowing that the “real thing” is nearby!
You may also want to try expressing a little milk and putting that on the nipple tip to get baby started. And if you haven’t tried a slow-flow nipple yet, give it a go: sometimes conventional nipples will make milk will come too fast for the baby.
As for the pacifier, some babies just don’t seem to be into them, which is not completely bad thing— while being a human pacifier is really difficult, we know, you also don’t have to deal with her pitching a fit if her pacifier falls out in the middle of the night, and you won’t have to worry about breaking her of the habit when her teeth start to come in, so there’s that!
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