Watch: The Best Way to Bottle Feed Your Baby
Discover tips from The Essential Baby Care Guide's care and development program
5 March 2013
Editor
The Essential Baby Care Guide, brought to you by The Essential Parent Company, aims to make every parent's life that little bit easier when it comes to caring for and understanding their baby.
Their guide is broken down into various different elements, and one of those focuses is feeding your baby with a bottle and how to do it properly.
Giving your baby a formula feed
Paediatric Dietitian, Melissa Little and mum Elaine talk through formula feeding your baby, revealing how to watch out for fullness cues and how to create a close bond throughout the feed.
So feeding your baby is a very special time between parent and baby to bond. If you do decide to formula feed your baby, you really want to maintain that same bond that you would during breastfeeding. So keeping baby really close to you, making eye contact, even putting their face on your skin, if you can, making sure they're really well supported, and just allowing them to take the bottle when they're ready and not force-feeding them.
Lots of times parents will think, if there's only a little bit of formula left in the bottle, they'll want their baby to finish it, or they think it's just a little bit left, but you really need to respect that when your baby's done, and they're showing you signs of fullness, they're done. It's better not to force them to have what's left in the bottle.
I like to hold her similar to what I'm doing now. She's usually sort of more flat and lying down a bit, more like that. It makes her feel relaxed. That's how I usually hold her. She seems to be quiet in that position.
