Breaking Habits

My wife and I have realized how difficult it can be to break a habit... not ours, but our daughter's. Vienna is 21 months old and up until a week ago was drinking all her milk from the bottle.

A bottle on rising in the morning, a bottle before lunch, one after her nap in the middle of the afternoon, and one just before bed time.

Our family doctor told us that, for the benefit of her teeth, we shouldn't feed her the bottle anymore. So we stopped.

But to get her to drink milk out of anything else has been impossible... and we've tried. We tried about five different cups, heating the milk, not heating the milk, adding chocolate, pretending to drink it ourselves, or feeding it to her teddy bears. It doesn't matter what we try, she sees right through our tactics. Nothing is as good as milk out of the bottle!

For about a year Vienna has been drinking all sorts of fluids from sippy-cups, normal cups, through a straw, juice boxes, but milk has always been consumed from a bottle. We tried a few months ago to get her to drink milk from a sippy-cup, but to no avail.

As parents, we suddenly realised the error of our ways, and good that we recognized that before our second is born (due in six weeks). Try not to establish habits that you know in the future you will have to break. Rather, try to establish the habit of flexibility and variation. If only we had our daughter drinking milk from more than one container from an early age, phasing out the bottle wouldn't be an issue.

Instead we've abandoned the bottle completely and with it, her milk consumption has dropped by 80%. So now we scramble to add milk or cheese to her diet where possible.

I know this will be a short-term situation, but it's frustrating because we didn't foresee this problem, but looking back we can see how we helped create it.