Ciervo notes, though, that she had practical reasons to allow her kids to keep using a bottle. She initially breast-fed her eldest child -- also her only biological child -- but medication that she required for an unrelated health condition forced her to stop after a month. Ciervo bottle-fed her second girl, who was adopted, from infancy.
When she tried to wean them off bottles, Ciervo found her girls rejected milk completely. Her pediatrician concluded that it was more important that the kids get milk than go off their bottles and told Ciervo to keep up the bottle-feeding until age 3.
"Both my girls loved bottles," Ciervo said. "It was a soothing part of the routine, a way to transition into the mornings and before bedtime. ... It's like me with my morning coffee."
But even though her kids are off the bottle now, they are still averse to milk. Her eldest, now 10, won't touch the stuff -- and the youngest, at age 5, only drinks flavored milk.
As some kids may need to twirl their hair, carry around a blanket or cuddle with a favorite toy, sucking on a bottle or pacifier is a soothing behavior for many kids. Breaking the bottle habit can be made easier for children with strong sucking needs when parents recognize and are sensitive to those.
"It's important that parents tune in to their individual child and what the bottle means to them," said Claire Lerner, director of Parenting Resources at Zero to Three, a parenting resource Web site. "It's not a monolithic response."
Transitioning a child from a bottle to a sippy cup or a regular cup using goodbye rituals or stories of a "bottle fairy" that took it away might be a way for a parent to honor and respect a child's needs.
Lerner pointed out that, if sucking on a bottle was the primary soothing thing a child did, that it was a parent's responsibility to meet that need in another way or the transition will be more difficult.
But not all are convinced of the cons of bottle-feeding. Ciervo said she never noticed any speech problems in her girls, despite her younger daughter only giving up her pacifier one week ago.
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