Breast is best
Breast milk is the best milk for babies. Breast milk provides the ideal balanced nutrition and protection for your baby. Maternal nutritional requirements increase during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Therefore mothers’ diets should include a wide variety of nutritious food and healthy snacks.
If you are considering bottle feeding, always seek professional advice as once bottle feeding has commenced it can be difficult to revert to breast feeding. Partial bottle feeding may also adversely affect breastfeeding by reducing the supply of breast milk. Always use and prepare infant formula as directed by the manufacturer; unnecessary or improper use of infant formula can be hazardous to the health of your baby.
Before using infant formula, always consider the social and financial implications, such as issues of convenience and cost to the household of using infant formula for at least 12 months. If you are considering using infant formula, it is important to discuss this with a health professional.
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Introducing a cup: 8 months and over
At this stage, you need to be encouraging your baby to use a cup to drink water from.
You can buy cups with special valves to sip from so it’s not a huge transition from your baby’s bottle. The Heinz Baby Basics range has some good options, including a trainer cup that comes with different interchangeable options to help them progress through the different stages of learning.
If you can choose an open or a free-flow cup without a valve (like the final stage of the trainer cup) that’s even better. This will help your baby learn to sip properly, and it’s better for their teeth.
Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Give your baby sips of water from a cup with their meals, as well as between meals.
- Keep at it! Getting them to use a cup every day is the key.
- Aim to have your baby off their bottle and using a cup by their first birthday.
A few benefits of using a cup are:
- Using bottles over 12 months are not a good habit - babies and toddlers who are allowed to sip milk out of a bottle all day are much more likely to get tooth decay.
- Your baby is likely to drink less milk from a cup therefore encouraging more of an appetite for food, which is good because food is becoming a more important part of their diet.
- Using a cup can help improve your baby’s hand-eye coordination.
- Cups are the great time saver, they’re much quicker and easier to clean than bottles.