Dear Mommies,
I know how stressful it is to have to deal with baby with drinking or food phobia. So allow me to share my success story that I hope you may find some of it useful.
Just for the background, my LO was born at 25th percentile. Like many mommies, I faced latching difficulty at the beginning. And in order to stop her weight loss to get to the unhealthy level, I decided to bottle feed my LO with expressed breast milk (EBM). Once bottle was introduced that early, combined with the fact that I have to return to work soon, we decided to stick with bottle feeding my EBM ever since.
At 4th month, my LO developed thrush in her mouth. The thrush caused my LO discomfort she refused to drink and consumed only 400-500ml for 2 days. We brought her to the PD and were prescribed oral medication. The thrush went away in 4-5 days. And we maintain strict oral care routine to ensure it never comes back. However, we were left with the baby with bottle phobia, who only drinks if she is drowsy. Our immediate way out is to dream-feed her for 2 months till her weight gain is stable. We started to feel that all day dream-feeding is very unnatural and disruptive i.e. hungry baby cannot fall asleep that easily, we got to rock a screaming baby for 30min 6 times a day in order to feed her, imagine how stressful.
So at 6th month, we decided to work together with all the caregivers to correct this habit of dinking aversion. I can say that we have succeeded so far and here’s how we did it.
1) Trust your baby’s instinct: After consulting many PD and did my own research, I was convinced that a healthy baby will know how to regulate their own food intake. She can take more or less food each day dependent on her body’s needs. Problem with me is, my baby is smallish, so deep down I always want her to drink more to grow bigger! I even kept the milk intake counter and I will get frantic if she hasn’t drink 50% of her daily intake my 12 noon! Baby can pick up on caregivers’ anxiety so when we are anxious, we unknowingly made the feeding session more stressful to everyone too. After I correct my mindset and become more relax, my baby feeding improves.
2) Do not force feed: Force feeding will add to the baby’s phobia. Watch for the feeding cue from the baby. We also try extending the frequency of the feeding slightly to make sure she is hungry before offering any food. For example, we extended each food offering by 30min instead of every 2 hours, we do 2.5 hours (remember, my baby consumed very little milk when she had thrush that’s why we feed her small amount but frequently). Now we manage to feed 130-140ml for each session with the 2.5-3hours interval. Total consumption per day is between 650-800ml. But if your baby gives you an obvious cue that she is hungry, then respond immediately.
3) Make the drinking more fun: We used all the techniques to redirect her attention from the feeding in the beginning to get her started. We sing for her, I even dance for her while the other caregiver is offering the bottle! And when my energy ran out, I use phone or tablet to play some interesting music or cartoon for her, thought I consciously limited the exposure. My baby opens her mouth or even grab onto the bottle if she wants to feed. If she fuss or shut her lips tight, stop offering and try again later after 10-15min. We reduces the distractions slowly and now she is able to do awake feeding with me singing beside her or just maintain good eye contact during the feeding.
4) Consistency: It will be very tempting to revert back to dream-feeding when you know your baby hasn’t been drinking for 6 hours and still keep refusing or fussing over. What I suggested is to remind yourself of point 1) and stick with it; feeding on the cue, feeding only when the baby is awake. For the first few days of the habit-changing boot camp, I can see that the milk intake has dropped from 700-800ml to 600ml+, but I decided to toughen up and persevere through, which in the end paid off. By the way, we are keeping the mid-night dream feeding (once a night) at first as we believe it will smoothen the transition process by not letting the milk intake dropped too sharply. We also decided to keep that once a day dream-feeding long term, but for some mommies that do not like the idea of dream-feeding, you may decide to drop it out completely once your baby feeding has stabilized, totally personal choice.
With all the techniques applied and a strong wills of all the caregivers, we managed to correct my LO drinking habit in 4 days (it was a tough 4 days boot camp). It takes a lot of courage to break away from old routines and habits, caregivers’ones especially. I must extend special thanks to my husband, my in-laws and my mommies’ friends for their support every steps of the way to make this transition successful. Lastly, I wish all mommies the best and hope to hear more success stories being shared here too. Xoxo!