Bottle Drama
Get Suri a sippy cup, doctors say.
The 2-year-old — who was spotted sucking away on Monday in NYC — is too old for a bottle.
“Most pediatricians recommend a bottle should be given up by age 1 — almost certainly by 18 months,” Dr. Charlotte Cowan, author of the Dr. Hippo book series, tells Usmagazine.com.
Suri’s constant traveling could play a factor.
“When babies are challenged, their diet is upset, their sleep is upset,” Cowan says. “They will regress back to previous habits … lingering with a bottle is comforting. You could argue that her parents have decided that this is not the time to try to wean her off if they’re traveling frequently.”
Cowan advises Tom and Katie try to “distract [her] with something that might be more appealing, like a sippy cup.”
(Parents should start their children on sippy cups between 9 and 11 months, Cowan says.)
Still, Tom and Katie shouldn’t freak that Suri’s still glued to her bottle.
“We panic and feel as if we have to break a child of that habit before it’s really necessary to do so,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, who has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, tells Us.
“We don’t have a wealth of experience that suggests from a psychological point of view children are harmed by using a bottle for too long,” he says.
Jokes Cowan: “Parents are always worried about getting their children off of bottles. I have never seen a child go to college with a bottle!”
