Breastfeeding - Propping a Baby With a Bottle

Don't do it!

• You might think it'd be convenient to prop your baby with a bottle and go about your business. There are even commercial products designed especially for this purpose.
• This harms your baby in many ways.
• One of the great benefits of breastfeeding is that it promotes contact between mother and child. If you decide to bottle-feed, you should try to do the same--hold your baby close, look into her or his eyes, stroke her or his back--all these things come naturally during breastfeeding, and are good for a baby's psychological and intellectual development.
• If you prop a baby with a bottle, you are depriving her or him from this benefit of breastfeeding.
• A young baby propped with a bottle may choke. If you're going about your own business, who's going to notice the baby?
• If you give your baby anything other than water (juice, milk, formula) in a propped bottle, you'll be promoting dental caries. Milk drips from a bottle on its own and pools around the front teeth. This causes cavities. This is so common that it is called the bottle-mouth syndrome.
• If your baby has asthma (which a bottle-fed baby is much more likely to have than an exclusively breastfed one), there is a serious risk of inhalation pneumonia from a propped bottle.
• If you thought you were going to bottle-feed because propping your baby with a bottle would be convenient, I hope you have changed your mind! It is one of the great advantages for breastfeeding for a baby that you cannot detach your breast from yourself. The baby needs you, not a piece of plastic.

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