Choosing A bottle for your breastfeeding baby

If you’re breastfeeding and you really want to add bottles into your parenting toolkit, it can be really hard to navigate all the marketing claims to find the right product that will protect your breastfeeding journey. 

The biggest fear I hear from families is that their baby will develop a “bottle preference” or have “nipple confusion” - but I have a few things to say on this.

Babies are clever, not confused.

What you may think is a “bottle preference” is babies being really, really clever.

You see, babies are hard-wired to breastfeed.

And they’re also hard-wired to thrive.

So when offering breastfed babies bottle-feeds we need to make breastfeeding and bottle-feeding just as easy or challenging as each other!

And this is where choosing the right tool can be helpful!

Despite their bold claims, no bottle or teat on the market can get anywhere close to the amazing powers of your breast tissue to be so dynamic.

What we can focus on is the speed of the flow of milk when using a certain teat (flow rate), the shape and slope of the teat, and what the tip of the nipple looks like.

Flow rate:

If we are thinking of how to keep breastfeeding and bottle-feeding just as challenging as each other, we need a bottle teat that doesn’t throw milk at your baby. There’s unfortunately no universal standards for flow rates with bottle teats, so the packaging may say “slow flow” but if you test it alongside some other teats you have at home it may tell you that it isn’t as slow as you first thought! With any bottle-feed we want the whole feed to take about the same time as a breastfeed would. If it’s too fast then babies might add in some unnecessary compensations to stem the flow (like chewing - which we don’t want!)

Teat shape and slope:

If we scale back our view and look at what actually happens in the baby’s mouth during a breastfeed, we have a baby that takes a decent amount of nipple and areola swelling to fill their mouth. This means we want the same principles at the bottle teat too.

Any bottle teats that have a small narrow teat and abruptly change shape to accomodate a wide base encourage babies to take and maintain a  shallow latch, and potentially risk air entry in the corners of their mouth while trying to feed. Not ideal - and not protective of a breastfed babies oral muscle patterns!

Any bottle teat that gradually slopes from narrow to wide is *technically* a more natural shape entering in baby’s mouth.

What the tip looks like:

I use this same advice when discussing dummy/pacifier shapes.

Please consider what shape you enjoy your nipple to be.

If it’s “symmetrical and round” then I would say aim for a bottle teat with that same principle!

When we have a painful, shallow latch during breastfeeding the nipple shape can change to a pinched, flattened, angled or even widened shape - let’s aim away from these shapes when looking at bottle teats.

I hope you’ve found this foundational information helpful, but I understand I may be throwing some information at tired parents here! So the cheat answer is here:

Where to start?

Brands such as Pigeon or Dr Browns have bottle teats that are narrow and long. Look for the gentle slope of the bottle teat from tip to base and aim for the bottles that are most narrow first - these make it much easier to pace the feed!

Paced feeding is a whole other post - coming soon.