Greetings All,

To all Lactnetters who are currently bottle-feeding and/or giving pacifiers/soothers to your babies, or who have bottle-fed and/or given pacifiers to your infant in the past, whether or not your baby also learned to breastfeed, did your baby ever display a clear preference for one style of artificial nipple over another?  When given a new style of artificial nipple, did your baby ever struggle with that novel artificial nipple, as if finding this new task to be a confusing learning experience, even though there was an initial willingness to attempt?  When your baby became old enough to begin learning how to use a sippee-cup, did your baby ever display a preference for a particular style of sippee-cup?  

I first asked similar questions many years ago in a prenatal WIC breastfeeding class that I was then teaching (for those outside the U.S., the WIC program is the federally-funded Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children).  At the point of the class in which I shared information on the Ten Steps, and particularly the clear recommendation in Step 9 (this was many years before the language change in 2018), I asked, "Does anyone here have bottle-feeding experience?" Some hands went up.  Next question: "Did your baby ever prefer one style of bottle nipple or pacifier over another brand or style?"  

One pregnant mother started laughing and said, "Oh, yes!" and then entertained us with this story:  With her first baby, she and her husband had received many bottles, bottle nipples, and pacifiers as baby gifts.  They narrowed down their choice to just one style for initially feeding their newborn, as recommended by some of their family members.  Some weeks later, the last bottle nipple in that one style wore out at midnight.  This was not a problem, or so the parents thought, since they had many other bottle nipples from which to choose.  Baby cried and cried during the various bottled offerings of milk with different styles of bottle nipples, to the extent that the father made haste on a midnight run to a drug store in search of Brand "A", the baby's apparent preferred brand.  Although it was an enjoyable story for our class in reinforcing the concept that such difficulties are not the exclusive domain of breastfed babies, the mother did say it was "so stressful" trying to calm her baby until dad returned home with the "right" bottle nipple.    

According to the child development literature, the younger we are, the more limited we are in our cognitive flexibility for competent task-switching, although task-switching has cognitive demands across the lifespan (the professional musician whose instrument is the clarinet will never practice for a job audition using the oboe, since there is a world of difference in the oral grasp of the clarinet and the oral grasp of the oboe).  

Developmental cognitive neuroscientists Adele Diamond and Natasha Kirkham refer to this as "attentional inertia," in that "it's easier to stay in the groove one is in."  Diamond is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia.  http://www.devcogneuro.com/

Kirkham is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck Lab, at the University of London.
http://cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/natasha-kirkham

Task switching is heavily studied in the cognitive sciences.  Today's PubMed search results for "task switching" = 3,273.

Note that even a PubMed search requires specificity.  If hyphenating the term as "task-switching", the search yields only 1,502 results.  

A classic study from Adele Diamond and Natasha Kirkham:

Title: Not Quite As Grown-Up As We Like To Think:  Parallels Between Cognition in Childhood and Adulthood.

In:  Psychological Science 2005 Apr;16(4):291-7.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1855149/
       

With kind regards,

Debbie

Debra Swank, RN BSN IBCLC
Program Director 
More Than Reflexes Education
Ocala, Florida USA
http://www.MoreThanReflexes.org

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