Before we condemn what we ourselves may not always practice, it is
important to look to those places/people who have!  I refer to cup feeding
and its possible dangers.

Bottles and rubber teats are a fairly new (less than 100 years old) way of
feeding babies.  IKNOW about the other variations on that theme that are
3000+ years old.  One such alternative is cup-feeding. In fact, I have a
facsimile of a feeding cup that a friend got me when in Germany.  It is
supposed to be an exact copy of what was used more than 1500 years ago.
More to the modern point, however, numerous countries today are places
where babies unable to go to breast (usually too tiny, too premature) are
cup-fed with no problems.  Why?

1) the people doing it know how to do so.
2) bottles and nipple sets are too expensive to purchase and use
3) bottles and nipple sets are very difficult to keep clean

The babies do well.  The smallest one I saw when overseas was 965 gm!  His
head was about the size of a small orange.  His eyes were bright and he
cupfed beautifully.  In fact, he was scheduled to begin going to breast the
next day! After a few weeks of cup feeding...

What do these many experiences with cup-feeding tell us?  Just like with
all other techniques, it works best when the people doing it have practiced
it and know what they are doing.  Before we condemn and suggest all kinds
of dangers, we need to know how to do the procedure safely.

Virtually ALL procedures harbor dangers.  Bottle-feeding has clear dangers;
see the references already mentioned (Meier, etal) in premies as well as
full-term babies.  What makes people more comfortable with it than with
othertechniques of feeding babies is the frequency with which it is
practiced and our (presumed) understanding of how to do it safely.

For those of you unfamiliar with cup feeding small babies, I strongly
recommend reviewing the article by Lang, originally appearing in a British
journal (LANCET).

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"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly
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Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Ferndale, WA USA) [log in to unmask]
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