How can I wean my baby off breastfeeding? I’m ready to wean my daughter off the breast and onto the bottle. She’s 6 months now and I’m going back to work soon so I want to make it easier for both of us. What’s the easiest and most effective way of doing this?
Hulda responds:
Look at how many breastfeeds you are currently giving your daughter and which ones you may possibly wish to keep as breast while the others can be bottle when you are at work. You may wish to keep the night and morning feed or discontinue breast feeding completely. In any case it is best to reduce the breastfeeds gradually so that your breasts will not get engorged by a sudden drop of feeds. Try dropping the second feed of the day and replace with the appropriate amount of formula milk via bottle, keep it to just this one feed for a few days until your breasts get used to the reduced feeding. Then drop another breastfeed, eg. late afternoon so you have a breastfeed in between the bottle feeds, keep at this level for a few days and then drop any others one by one in the same way. Your daughter may not like the bottle teat at first as it is so different from sucking at the breast, try the ‘Nuk’ or other similar shaped teats and persevere. If she will not take the bottle from you, try with someone else giving her the bottlefeed until she is feeding well. Sometimes the fact that a baby can still smell breastmilk from the mother makes the transition to bottle more difficult if the mother is giving the bottle. This is soon overcome, once she is established with bottle feeding.