and her breasts provide. It also deprives the mother of a significant source of connection with her child.
·    It is believed that changing between the breast, a bottle and a dummy can lead to "nipple confusion", meaning a baby has less familiarity with the dominant "teat".
·    The hassles of having to warm the milk (of whatever variety), sterilise the bottle and accessories, store the milk, wash and store all these items, is a lot more time and fuss, not to mention increased risk of contamination.
·    Although the manufacturers would have tried very hard to produce a range of teats to imitate those of different breasts, different nipples and with differing flow rates, it would obviously be better that each child has the familiar size and shape of his mothers own nipple to feed from.
·    The milk pressure from a breast will be different from a bottle such that bottles release much more liquid for far less effort, leading to very easy over supply.
·    Wind is a common problem with bottle fed babies because of this over supply and the extra air they will gulp as the milk flows down so fast.
·    The ease with which the milk flows, reduces the baby's sucking power so that over time they become lazy and prefer the teat to the breast.
·    By far the greatest danger associated with the use of bottles, is the attachment children make to such "mobile breasts". Bottle-fed babies often grow into bottle-sucking toddlers. Their bottles become like security toys, always with them, and woe betide the parent who tries to remove it from them. Rather than relying on the wisdom of the mother as to when they get a "drink", one often sees toddlers in the home and in public simply helping themself to their pre-filled bottle at any time they desire. At these later stages, their bottles are usually filled with commercial liquids - fruit juices, plain or flavoured cow's milk, or even soft drinks. No longer is the relationship of feeding and drinking a supply-and-demand equation based on real hunger and need, but one where the mother can simply supply the child something to suck on when she wants it to be quiet and happy without any giving from herself. As well, the child can simply demand something to drink when bored knowing he / she will not be refused. I find the ubiquitous sight of toddlers, slumped in strollers, mindlessly sucking on bottles that hang limply from their mouths, a deeply disturbing symptom of a serious crisis in child raising brought about by the fashion of bottle feeding. Sadly, the bottle and its sugary contents have replaced the emotional sustenance they should have

gained (and grown out of by then) from the intimacy of snuggling into their mother's breast. The growing popularity of those pop-up-and-suck type bottles with children, adolescents and adults, causes me to wonder if such fashions are a manifestation of a century's suppression of breastfeeding leading to a habitual baby bottle attachment combined with unsatisfied infantile breast desire.

Dummies
   A first cousin to the rubber teat of the baby bottle is the rubber teat of the dummy. Irrespective of whether a teat is feeding or just pacifying, in either circumstance teats are far from what a baby really needs or wants. Nowadays dummies are more politely called "pacifiers" so as not to infer that anybody is stupid, as well as to hide their primary purpose - that is to quieten a child, to make them dumb. But whilst it may sound like they have been pacified, the insertion of a rubber plug (read false nipple) into any child's mouth - especially one who is not old enough to take it out - could never actually satisfy the reason they were making a noise in the first place.
   Whilst all new parents imagine in advance that their little baby will cry a bit and even scream loudly from time to time, many are surprised at the frequency and volume of their noises. But whether it be a cry of hunger, a cry of pain, a cry for attention and company, or even the joyous shouts of vocal exploration, rather than suppressing this noise, a mother should be resolving it and learning from it. If a mother has provided all that a child needs at that particular time, and the child's temperament is such that they still "turn it on", it is a far wiser approach to teach the child that crying for no good reason will gain them nothing - not even the dummy. In this way they will soon stop their fuss and learn self discipline, contentment and patience. Although it may not seem so, it is never too early to teach children these things. Babies very quickly become creatures of habit and it is a mother's duty to decide which habits are advantageous to the child's development and which are not.
   To be truthful, dummies are most usually used to pacify the mother! If she doesn't feel like breastfeeding at that time, the false nipple will stave off the baby's demands for a while; if she can't stand the noise of a baby she is unable to console, it can be made quiet with the impossible challenge of trying to extract milk from rubber; if the child is used to crying itself to sleep, it can be taught to suck itself to sleep; all of which indicate something missing in the mother-child relation-ship.