From a Bottle To a Cup
The child doesn’t want to leave the bottle? It’s time to help him.
The move from a bottle to a cup is essential for the motoric development, it enables him to improve mouth control and also speech evolution.
“Each child has it’s own rhythm”, or “don’t do comparisons between the children” how many times have yo heard those sentences. It’s time to understand that sometimes comparisons can “shake” us in a positive way, ’cause if we won’t help our child to catch up, sometimes he might stay behind.
I came to this conclusion after staring at my friends baby sipping from a cup and he’s barely 16 months old. My friend who saw my looks giggled and said: ” You don’t know how much training it took until we got hold of this”. And I started to understand why my child (recently celebrating 2 years) is still attached to a bottle. I realized that things don’t always happen on their own.
Developing skills of eating and drinking are developmental milestones. During their first years babies advance gradually from sucking pattern to a biting-chewing pattern. To move from one pattern to another requires a timing of sequence movements, where each element supports and promotes in full interaction with the other elements.
What is the main contribution of drinking from a cup to the toddler development?
Drinking from a cup is an important experience, essential to the motoric development. By using a cup the toddler learns to put in is mouth a certain amount of liquid, and at the same time to control the amount he already has in is mouth space and swallow it. In addition the toddlers learns to increase the variety of movements and to develop eye-hand and hand-mouth coordination, which is purchased by trial and error. The new movements of drinking from a cup, improves the control of the mouth and the future development of speech.
Tolerance and patience
Many times the transfer from a bottle to a cup is a complex task for the toddler. Parents can promote these processes, but also sometimes delay them for various reasons:
If due to a lack of knowledge on making the right move, and because of concerns such as grunting a premature independence to the child, or even from a consideration of a clean house.
Parents must understand that the toddler needs to learn trough experience, and that their mission is to allow him such a practice. In addition, it is important to make the crossing from a bottle to a cup in the right time, and not to postpone it to a later age, even if this transition requires a lot of involvement.
Today there is a variety of cups designed to make the transition of the toddler as smooth as possible.
