The Best Bottles for Breastfed Babies
Choosing the Best Bottles for Breastfed Babies: Promoting Optimal Oral Function
When it comes to feeding your breastfed baby, your bottle choice is an important decision. Many parents choose to introduce bottles for many reasons, such as supplementing breast feeds, ensuring others can participate in feedings, or for convenience when mom is away. However, not all bottles are created equal, especially when you want to maintain optimal breastfeeding habits and promote your baby’s oral development.
As lactation consultants, we know that choosing the right bottle can significantly impact your breastfeeding journey and your baby’s oral function. Below, we’ll explore the key factors to consider when selecting a bottle, along with some top bottle recommendations for breastfed babies.
There are hundreds, thousands, of bottles out there for you to choose from. And they all say “Best bottle for breastfed babies!” “Most breast-like!” But the reality is, most bottles with such wonderful marketing verbiage, really aren't the best for breastfed babies.
In addition to being “good” for breastfed babies, we want to make sure the bottles we’re using are also promoting optimal oral development, and encouraging them to use the same muscles in the same way, when they go to the breast.
Key Factors in Choosing the Best Bottles for your Baby:
1. Mimicking the Breast
Babies who switch between breast and bottle need a nipple that mimics the natural shape, flow, and feel of the breast. Look for bottles designed to promote a deep latch, with a wide base and soft, pliable nipple. This helps ensure your baby’s latch onto the bottle is similar to their latch onto the breast, which is important for preserving your breastfeeding success.
2. Slow Flow Nipples
A slow-flow nipple is essential for preventing flow preference and for maintaining breastfeeding patterns. Breastfeeding requires babies to work for their milk, and a fast-flow bottle can lead to a preference for the bottle, where milk comes more easily. A slow-flow nipple ensures your baby has to suck and work to get the milk, mimicking breastfeeding. A large majority of the breastfed babies we support, begin with a preemie level nipple, and most of them never have to move to a faster flow.
3. Optimal Oral Function
The shape of the nipple and the design of the bottle can influence oral development. Babies’ sucking patterns stimulate the muscles of the mouth, jaw, and tongue, all of which are important for proper oral function. Bottles that encourage a wide latch and the use of oral muscles, rather than just passive drinking, or utilizing their lips more thant their tongue, can support better oral motor skills, reducing issues like tongue thrust or speech delays later in life.
As lactation consultants, we support many babies with bottle feeding. We review the best bottles to add to your baby registry with our prenatal consults, we review improved bottle feeding techniques for babies who may take in a lot of air or have prolonged bottle feeds, and we see many families for bottle refusal (which can present for a number of reasons).
If you are having trouble with bottle feeding, a lactation consultant is the best place to start—we have lots of tools in our repertoire to get to the root cause of the problem and help you and your baby get back to better feeding!
Our favorite bottle brands include:
Dr. Brown’s Narrow
Lansinoh
Evenflo Balance
Pigeon