Breastfeeding experts and advocates will always warn you about nipple confusion/preference.  The advice is not to feed your baby with a bottle or give your baby a pacifier because your baby will grow to prefer the bottle teat and reject your breasts.  Or they will get 'confused'.  (I personally think that they are too smart to be confused.  They are just exhibiting their preference.)  Seldom do you see bottle rejection mentioned.  More often than not, they scare mothers into not giving a bottle until it is too late. It is as if there is this conspiracy to get mothers to breastfeed their babies and not warn them about bottle rejection so that once they are stuck, they are stuck!

In fact, about the only time I see any discussion or information on bottle rejection is on mother/parenting forums where desperate mothers ask  for help to get their babies to take a bottle.  Bottle rejection seems to be something that one only get to learn through experience in real life, and often times, too late.

To save you the trouble of going around asking for help, I have consolidated a list of strategies that have been tried by mothers who have been there done that.  Judging by the variety of strategies (some rather crazy-sounding), you know bottle rejection is no laughing matter and parents do get really desperate.

Strategies

1. Try different kinds of teat

Not just small teats vs big teat, latex vs silicon.  Try different flows - slow, fast, variable, etc.  Try different brands even if they look the same.  In recent years, more and more teats and bottles of special design has been introduced to the market, eg. Breastflow from The First Years, which I found recently.   Don't complain about the cost of buying all the teats available in the market.  If you can find one that the little one takes too, you will be considered very lucky for your ordeal stops right here.

2. Try different bottles

If teats strategy failed, try using different bottles.  Thankfully, there are not so many varieties, and you probably would have tried at least a wide neck bottle and a standard neck bottle when you tried the big teat and small teat.  I even tried one of those bottles with a spoon attached instead of a teat.

3. Try different feeding places
Different room, different couch, different bed, etc.  This sounds weird but it is true.  Some babies are THAT picky.  To some babies, the commandment is : Thou shalt not defile the place where breastfeeding usually takes place.

4. Try getting someone else to do the feeding
The idea is that if you do the feeding yourself, your baby can smell you and is smart enough to know that the real McCoy is present and will not take a substitute.

5. Try feeding the baby yourself

Yes, yes, this is a direct contradiction of Point Number 4.  But some babies may just prefer to have mommy give the bottle because mommy is the favourite person after all.