Written By: Debjani Arora | Published : May 6, 2016 1:57 PM IST
Expressing milk is a lot of effort and takes a lot of time and energy of the mother to collect, store and feed the baby whereas breastfeeding doesn t call for these challenges. Most working mothers prefer to express milk and store it for future use. Probably, expressing milk and storing it comes as the next best option for mothers who want to breastfeed but are not able to due to various reasons.
Expressed milk is far better than formula feed and there isn t a doubt about that. But sometimes your baby can stop having expressed breast milk from a bottle and want to suckle at the breast. There is nothing wrong with your child in this situation and neither are you doing anything wrong that can make your baby refuse express breast milk from the bottle. Instead, this could be due to nipple confusion. Most of the time people think that nipple confusion happens only in infancy. But this isn't the case, every baby is different and so are there different needs. I can say this because I faced this situation when my daughter refused to take expressed milk from a bottle. She was happy being breastfed. If your baby has been breastfed often before you started to feed expressed milk from the bottle, your child could be reluctant to switch to the bottle as she might have grown comfortable suckling at your breast.
If this situation happens, there is no need to worry. You can keep trying to give your baby the bottle once a while to try settling her with the same and continue with your breastfeeding sessions. In fact, if you are weighing your choices and trying to decide between breastfeeding or using expressed milk and bottlefeeding, according to our expert Sonali Shivlani, internationally certified lactation expert and prenatal coach here are a few reasons why breastfeeding is still better than feeding expressed milk from the bottle:
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