The Value of Teaching 5-Month-Old Babies to Drink from a Cup

Teaching a baby to drink from a cup actually has a more significant worth than it may seem initially. Sucking and swallowing are the only steps required or involved in the incipient pattern of feeding of a baby. A vital process necessary in the modification of a baby's feeding pattern, leading to the adult patterns of eating, is drinking with the use of a cup. Drinking from a cup is decidedly more complicated than the "suck-and-swallow" process. It also requires additional muscle coordination.

Starting as early as five months of age, your baby should be trained to drink from a cup. This is not aiming, at such an early age, to detach your baby from his regular means or pattern of feeding which is by nursing. What is intended here instead is for your baby to have an early start in developing muscle control. Equally important is to prevent from happening your baby at, say, ten months offering resistance should drinking from a cup astonishes him at that stage.

The use of milk, rather than juice (i.e., orange juice), is given emphasis here. It has been proven that drinking juice from a cup does not set forth the habit patterns that will subsequently be useful when the baby is shifted from taking milk from breast or bottle to a cup. Milk is what your baby should learn to drink from a cup.

Initially, a baby is taught to drink from a cup by allowing him to sip an amount of milk equivalent to a single swallow. If your baby resists this, do not try again for the next couple of weeks. After this period, try again; your baby may be more submissive this time. Do not think of your baby as being naughty if he happens to spit out the milk. The reason why he may do this at the early stages of the training is that he has not yet fully learned to control his mouth and tongue muscles well.

Moms should note however that requiring her baby to give up taking milk from a bottle at any certain age won't result to any particular benefit. A bottle of milk after all is always a source of delight to every baby. Permitting your baby to go on with this innocent pleasure is, of course, better than developing in him emotional tensions that may result from making him abandon his bottle and forcing him to drink milk from a cup. [Read the Original Article]

Sources:

"Teaching Your Baby To Use A Cup" - http://dhs.wisconsin.gov/WIC/cards/baby/PPH4881.pdf
"The ABC's Of Teaching Your Baby To Use A Cup" - http://health.state.tn.us/wic/PDFs/Infants/ABCs_teaching_baby.pdf