Help Getting Daughter to Sleep Without Bottle!

You can take the hard step of just not giving it to her. It will make for a few hard nights but after that she will be done with the bottle. My friend told her little one it was lost and another friend tied balloons to a bottle and let her daughter send it to heaven to the baby angels and then replaced it with a "big girl bed buddy" of the girl's choice. She bought it a few days before but would not let the baby take it to bed until she agreed to send her bottle to the baby angels. (Hint, go to a parking lot where there are not a lot of trees, if the bottle gets stuck in the tree it makes it hard to remind her that she sent it to the baby angels)

Good luck,
C.

I didn't have to deal with this issue personally, but I have heard that you can fill the bottle with water instead of formula or milk. I think that the kids don't care about drinking the water, so they don't seem to care about the bottle anymore since they aren't getting what they wanted out of it anyway.

If that doesn't work, I think you're just going to have to take it away. She may cry for several nights, but it should get progressively better as she realizes that you aren't going to give in (obviously, this means you can't give in ;-))

I have also heard that you shouldn't put a child to bed with a bottle because the milk stays in their mouth and it can be really bad for their teeth. By your daughter's age, you should probably be brushig her teeth right before bed and she should only have water after that if possible anyway. Just one more thing to keep in mind.

Good luck to you! I'm sure she will do better than you think.

My son stopped have a bottle at night a few months ago...he's 17 months now. At a year I transitioned him from a bottle to a sippy cup which took awhile because we had to try several different kinds before we found one he liked. After we got him on a sippy cup I just started putting water in it at night instead of milk. After a few weeks I noticed he wasn't drinking as much (the sippy cup was still fairly full) and just stopped giving it to him. He has had no problems with wanting it back. I think it's important that you don't rush her as this will cause much less stress for both of you. I would however recommend not giving her milk/formula because of the risk of tooth decay. Hope this helps.

This may go against what your pediatrician tells you but here it goes. I have two children. One is 3 and a half and the other is 14 months. My oldest did not give up her night time bottle until she was 20 months old and the dr we used at the time did not have a problem with it. It is a comfort object. In the last week of her taking her bottle we would give her milk in her sippy cup and then just a bottle of water to take to bed. she decided she did not need it on her own and we have never regressed. My son's dr said to go ahead and get rid of the bottles but what worked for my first born will be good for him too. He is already not dependent on a bottle to go to sleep. We do still give him 2 bottles a day though. He gets one in the morning when he gets up around 7:30 then he eats breakfast with his sister around 9:00am. Any other milk is given in a sippy cup until around 7pm and he gets his last bottle then and goes to bed around 8:30.