While it is tempting to ‘encourage’ your baby to finish a bottle, it's more important to follow their cues. You want your baby's appetite to regulate how much they take. To avoid waste, you may like to offer smaller volumes at the start and top up if your baby is looking for more.

It’s also important, when you can, to make bottle feeding a time when you are available to interact with and enjoy your baby. This is the beginning of your baby’s life-long healthy relationship with food, so mealtimes are never about being pressured to eat, but are about social connection, feeling satisfied, and enjoyment.

Read more articles about how to do paced bottle feeding

Useful things to know if you bottle feed your baby

About paced bottle feeding

Your baby's position when bottle feeding

Following your baby's cues for bottle feeds

When does your baby have a conditioned dialling up with the bottle and what to do about it?

Acknowledgements

These pages on bottle feeding in the Brief & simple summary of When baby cries a lot were co-written with Renee Keogh RN IBCLC, Founding NDC Educator.

I'm grateful to Professor Sophie Havighurst, Ros June, and Caroline Ma at Mindful, The University of Melbourne, for their feedback on the articles and videos in When baby cries a lot in the first few months of life. They helped me keep the language plain and the concepts as accessible as possible, for this brief and simple version of the Possums 5-domain approach to the crying baby.