
Parenting Toddlers (1-3) Support Group
This community is focused on the joys, challenges and concerns faced by parents of toddlers (1 to 3 year olds). The major areas of child development include: physical development, perception and sensory development, communication and language development, cognitive development, emotional development and social development. Join to share your stories and get advice.
My daughter is nearly 2 and still taking her bottle before nap and before bed. I'm not even going to try taking it from her until she's finished cutting her two year molars. At that time, I plan to just switch her to a Nuby cup. Right now she holds the bottle herself, snuggles next to me and I read books while she drinks it. I stopped "cradling" her and giving it to her a few weeks ago since we're getting close to being done with the bottles now.
As for the waking up to eat in the middle of the night, we had that problem when she was younger...we started doing a bigger bedtime snack and then when she woke wanting a bottle around 3am, we only offered her water and we didn't pick her up to give it to her. She sort of lost her motivation for waking up for it since she wasn't getting picked up and she wasn't getting milk anymore, lol. After like a week she stopped waking for it. Maybe we were lucky with her in that regard.
Good luck! I would google the co-sleep thing, there are a lot of great books out there on helping kids sleep through the night and maybe you would find a few good resources that way too!
WOW these are 2 big things. I do not think htat you can do both at once. I think that you have to pick which one to start. I thinkthat your son waking at night is just habit. At 3 they really should not need to have a bottle, i agre with the other post give him a bigger night time snack. Also the bottle is not good for the teeth at that age. Believe me I have said that at 1 the bottle is still part of the comfort zone. I think 3 is too long for bottles. I would choose which is more important and work on that. I think leaving the bottle and working on gettin him in his own bed would be my choice and then take the bottle. good luck.