As a team of feeding experts, we're here to help make mealtimes joyful and give parents the confidence to raise healthy little eaters! We share weekly updates with our newest research-backed articles and our best feeding tips!
Open cup drinking - when and how to start
Published 2 months ago • 4 min read
Introducing an open cup to your baby promotes independence, oral development, and essential motor skills. While it may seem daunting initially, with the right cup and approach, open-cup drinking can become an enjoyable part of your baby’s daily routine!
In this week's blog, we give you all the details about how to introduce an open cup, when to start, why an open cup for babies is recommended over sippy cups, and what features to look for when choosing an open cup.
We’ll also share our favorite open cups, practical teaching tips, and strategies for managing spills and messes!
New to My Little Eater? We have a Baby Led Feeding Coursefor parents of babies 6-11 months of age to teach you all you need to know about feeding your baby like an expert! We also have a Feeding Toddlers courseto help you prevent picky eating and overcome it (if it's already started). We recommend starting that at 11-12 months of age! Bundle the two and get 20% off each (with lifetime access to each!) - click here for the bundled total.
OPEN CUP VS SIPPY CUP
Did you know that as pediatric dietitians (along with other pediatric health professionals like dentists and speech-language pathologists), we do not recommend giving your baby/toddler a sippy cup?
This is because hard spout sippy cups are not good for speech, dental, and oral motor development. With frequent use, they can prevent proper tongue-tip elevation and they keep your baby limited to the same oral motor skills they used when drinking from a bottle. Note - For this same reason, it's also why we want babies to move on from bottle feeding after 12 months of age - as it promotes immature suck-and-swallow tongue and lip patterns.
Additionally, open and straw cups are the "regular" cups your child will see outside of the home, so it's important for them to know how to use these types of cups.
We gave my niece, Aila, sips of water from an open cup ever since her very first meal starting solids! She loved it and did so well (with help of course)!
Speaking of Aila's solids journey, we've committed to reposting her first 30 days of starting solids on Instagram, and this week we re-posted day 4, day 5, and day 6. So far, we've already introduced 11 new foods (about 2 per day)!
Our thought process with introducing all these new foods is that the chances of her being allergic to one of these non-highly allergenic foods is SLIMMMM, and the downside of not exposing her to as many foods as we can in the first 60-90 days of starting solids is a much bigger deal.
Read more about why you don't need to follow the 3-day wait rule when introducing new foodshere.
We know that the more she experiences from a flavor and texture perspective, the more foods she will learn to love in this "honeymoon" phase of starting solids, and the easier it will be when she likely hits her "pickier" phase at 10 months+.
Not only will it be harder at that time to get her to like new foods, but if she starts dropping previously accepted foods (which is common), she will still have a big repertoire of foods to work with.
This is how we get to 115 new foods introduced in just 60 days!
Aila's mom has been loving having this checklist on her fridge, and can't believe how fast she's able to go through foods! When you can easily see it, it's super motivating to keep going for more.
Plus, you can track how many times your baby has been exposed to a food. So even though she may have been introduced to a food once, mom is reminded to re-offer it a few times at some point within the first year to keep up a tolerance to it and reinforce her liking for the food.
Aila's mom also LOVES the allergen tracking part of the list!
It lists out the top 10 allergens and color codes them, so anytime they show up in a food that isn't as obvious that it could be an allergen (like toast containing the wheat allergen) - it's highlighted in the color corresponding to the correct allergen, and she can follow the introducing allergen protocol outlined in the meal plan and baby led feeding course!
If you're looking for something to keep you on track, instructions for what and how to serve foods, and lessons on how to introduce solids from 6-11 months with all the confidence, you'll find it all in one of the three options below.
And if you want a full-blown course so you can learn everything on video, step-by-step, and have EVERY ASPECT of solids covered, we've got that for you in our course + meal plan bundle.
Happy feeding!
Edwena Kennedy, RD Registered Pediatric Dietitian & Feeding Expert Owner, My Little Eater Creator of The Texture Timeline™ Instagram: @mylittleeater
Baby Led Feeding (Starting Solids) & Toddler Feeding
As a team of feeding experts, we're here to help make mealtimes joyful and give parents the confidence to raise healthy little eaters! We share weekly updates with our newest research-backed articles and our best feeding tips!
