My personal experience with this has made me take a sort of third-way
position on whether or not to "introduce" bottles ahead of time.
When my older daughter was 8 weeks old and I introduced occasional bottles as
I began to get ready to go back to work, she flatly refused to take them --
SCREAMED blue murder whenever she saw them coming.
A smart LC told me that "introducing" the bottle was the right way to think
about it: Avital didn't need to start getting nourishment from bottles yet,
but she did need to get to know the bottle, to think of it as a friendly
rather than oppressive presence in her world, just as we always say that the
earliest solid feedings are more social than nutritional.
So for a few weeks, every day, at some point, a bottle appeared in her field
of view; and gradually I -- or ideally someone else -- would try to persuade
her to take a sip or two of milk out of it, just so she'd know that she could
drink from it if she wanted. We usually did this when she was not especially
hungry, but not right after she had nursed, either -- it was meant to seem
more or less casually unrelated to "real food."
Gradually, she grew grudgingly reconciled to the bottle's presence,
occasionally sipping as much as half or three quarters of an ounce
voluntarily from it by 10 or 12 weeks. Her babysitter's first report to me
was "She doesn't seem to like her bottle very much," and really she never got
to love it; but she could eventually snuggle down on a caregiver's warm arm
with some milk when she was tired and I was at work, and that was important
for her.
I am not arguing that one *must* introduce the bottle early so the baby can
get used to it. But I am saying that sometimes -- given that bf is already
well established, say sometime after the first month and for some babies much
later -- it can be easier to start it appearing at least occasionally at a
stage when it is NOT do or die -- when it really just doesn't matter whether
it's "a feeding" or not. The pressure is off of the feeder and off of the
baby. If she drinks, fine; if not, it doesn't matter all that much; they've
been introduced, they've met. And then later, when for many babies the
bottle really is the only food source available for the next eight hours or
so, it's an aquaintance, not a terrorist who has made off with mom.
Just another way of thinking about this that may help some mothers.
Elisheva Urbas
NYC
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