3 Months Old and Refusing the Bottle: Read this first

Four days into what has genuinely felt like a political hunger strike. You know the one, if you have a toddler. Add a heatwave, add the kind of tired that sits behind your eyes rather than in front of them, add a small person refusing everything except crackers and outrage, and by day four I was not my calmest self.

I caught myself doing the thing I tell parents never helps. Getting frustrated. Adding pressure. Prompting her to just take a bite, just try it, even though I know with my whole heart that pressure never gets a child eating, it only ever gets them further away from the table.

I am not immune to any of this, by the way. In the thick of early motherhood, sleep deprived and recovering from childbirth, I tracked everything. Feeds, naps, nappies, every number logged like it might tell me something true about how I was doing as a mother. I asked anyone who would listen whether what I was seeing was normal. The anxiety looped and looped, and I was the person who was supposed to know.

I think about that a lot now, because I don't believe it was really about the tracking, or the toddler food strike, or even the feeding. I think the internet has built itself around making us panic. Everything gets framed as a problem to fix or a milestone to hit, and if your child isn't doing the thing on the timeline, something in the framing tells you that means something is wrong with them, or with you. It is relentless, and it is designed to keep us looking, checking, comparing, never quite settling.

A baby who needed answers, not an exit

A mum told me last week about a moment that has stayed with me since. Her baby is three months old and will not take a bottle, and a doctor told her to just wean him.

Three months old. Wean him.

I want you to sit with how that lands on a parent who is already frightened. Not because the advice was cruel, I don't think it was meant that way at all, but because it was built for a situation that isn't hers. A three month old who won't take a bottle is not a baby who is ready to be weaned onto something else entirely, that is a baby who needs someone to understand why the bottle isn't working, not a baby who needs the problem removed by skipping past it.

Advice built for the average baby, not yours

That is the piece I keep coming back to. So much of the advice parents receive, in doctors' offices, on the internet, from someone well meaning at a barbecue, is not wrong because the person giving it doesn't care. It is wrong because it was never built for the actual baby in front of them. It was built for a general baby, an average case, a rule of thumb, and your baby is not an average case, your baby is your baby.

I don't have a neat ending for this one. I am still four days into the food strike as I write this, still tired, still occasionally catching myself adding pressure I know doesn't work. What I know now that I didn't fully know then is that the panic is not a sign you are failing. It is a sign of how much you love this small, specific, particular person, and how much the world around you is built to make that love feel like a test you might be failing.

You are not failing. You are parenting a real baby through a real moment, and real babies do not follow the general advice, because they were never the ones it was written for.

If your baby is the one none of the general advice fits, the First Step Feeding Consultation starts with looking at your baby specifically, not the guide.

Laura xo