Sound familiar? It looks like you are facing infant feeding aversion. But don’t despair — it can be overcome!
Infant feeding aversion
My baby refuses the bottle, even though they used to feed well
It usually starts around the second month of life (5–8 weeks and older). A baby who used to calmly finish their feeds starts refusing and feeding restlessly. The mother is told to “feed them any way you can”, and the refusal only gets stronger: even when hungry, the baby arches their back, screams and turns away. You end up rocking your baby and feeding them while they sleep, but over time even that stops working.
What is feeding aversion
Refusing to feed from a bottle is called infant feeding aversion (or bottle-feeding aversion). “Aversion” means a strong dislike or rejection.
It is a psychological state in which a baby tries to avoid feeding. The aversion develops towards food or towards the circumstances of feeding — usually certain events or actions of adults during feeds. The baby avoids eating because of fear, stress and anxiety, and feeding becomes unpleasant for them.
The key difference: the baby knows how to eat but, for some reason, doesn’t. And they have already had experience of normal, calm feeding.
Who develops aversion
- Most often physically healthy babies who refuse food despite clear signs of hunger.
- Usually babies older than 6–7 weeks, especially at 3–5 months and later — up to about one year.
- Aversion is the refusal of milk (formula or expressed breast milk) specifically from a bottle. Refusing the breast is much less common.
Risk groups
- Babies who have had feeding difficulties since birth: premature babies, babies who struggle to coordinate sucking, swallowing and breathing.
- Babies whose parents are very anxious about weight and the amount eaten and control them strictly — for example, after a difficult start with weight gain, or because of feeding advice that was wrong or misunderstood.
How common is it
25–35%of children, according to various studies, have difficulties with eating
Exact figures for infant feeding aversion are unknown: it often goes unrecognised or is mistaken for other problems.
Sources: Tharner 2014, Cardona Cano 2015, Machado 2021, Viljakainen 2019, Dubois 2007, Putnick 2022, Dinkler 2022.
Signs of aversion
If you notice any of these in your baby — the more matches, the more important it is to see a specialist.
- After a few sips pulls their whole body away, turns away, closes their mouth or pushes the bottle away with their hands
- Tenses up, gets very upset, cries or screams when being prepared for a feed: brought to the usual place, laid in the feeding position, shown the bottle
- Closes their mouth, turns away and arches their back at the sight of the bottle
- The baby looks hungry but refuses to eat
- Feeds only when asleep or drowsy
- May drink water from an ordinary bottle but refuses formula
Not sure whether your baby really has an aversion? Take the full test (in Russian).
Pain is not always the reason for refusal
When parents are faced with their baby refusing to feed, the first and quite logical thought is that the baby is in pain.
Parents and doctors usually think the baby refuses food because of pain or severe discomfort, and look for a medical problem. That is right: health must always be checked. But babies are often diagnosed with reflux, cow’s milk protein allergy or lactose intolerance just to explain the refusal somehow.
Most likely it is not pain if:
- between feeds the baby is cheerful, active and content
- as soon as the bottle is taken away, they stop crying almost immediately
- they feed well while asleep, with no bouts of pain or refusal
100%of aversion cases
The main cause is pressure on the baby during feeds
Pressure is present in 100% of aversion cases, and in 90% of them it is the only cause. Aversion is a psychological and behavioural problem. Anything can trigger the first refusal, but it is pressure that turns it into a full aversion: coaxing, forcing the bottle in, trying to feed at any cost.
What can trigger the first refusal
- The taste of formula, milk or medicine
- Sensory processing difficulties
- Episodes of choking, gagging, trauma
- Pain: reflux, cow’s milk protein allergy, constipation, mouth ulcers, teething
- Noise and too much stimulation during feeds, an overexcited nervous system
- Sucking difficulties, for example poor coordination of breathing, sucking and swallowing
- Jaw anomalies: cleft palate, small jaw, tongue tie
- Neurological and functional problems: cerebral palsy, birth injuries, weak sucking reflex, low muscle tone
Where the pressure comes from
Most often parents try to feed the baby more than they need. The reasons:
- unrealistic expectations
- amounts printed on the formula tin or found online
- doctor’s recommendations (not always well-founded)
- high parental anxiety
But babies have a natural self-regulation mechanism: they know how much food they need. A baby may eat different amounts at different feeds and gain weight unevenly — and that is normal. Responsive feeding supports this mechanism, while pressure and forcing destroy it.
More about aversion, real-life cases and support for mums — in our Telegram channel (in Russian).
Caution: what only makes aversion worse
This advice is often given with the best intentions. But it doesn’t just fail to work — it directly makes the aversion worse and locks the baby in a cycle of “fear — pressure — avoidance”.
- Offering the bottle every 20–30 minutes “so they eat at least something”, or stretching a feed over 1–2 hours in small portions
- Feeding while asleep or half-asleep during the day
- Rocking, distracting with toys and cartoons, feeding in the dark, swapping the dummy for the bottle
- Topping up with a syringe, spoon or cup
- Physically “triggering” sucking: pressing, moving the teat around in the mouth
- Insisting on “getting in” the volumes from feeding charts
- Switching to bitter specialised formulas without a medical reason
- Mixing medicine into the bottle
- Using high-calorie or concentrated formulas or thickeners
- Starting solids before 6 months or before the aversion is resolved
Early solids: a rescue or a new problem?
Parents of 4–5-month-old babies are often advised to start solids early, especially if the baby is not gaining weight well. Worried parents offer purées and porridge, hoping the baby will eat solids better.
But babies who are given solids without interest in food and before they are ready for them (readiness usually comes at around 6 months) often refuse all food at 7–9 months. And a problem with solids is added to the problem with the bottle.
What research says:
- Babies who started solids before 6 months are 2.5 times more likely to become picky eaters (Shim et al., 2011).
- Picky eating after two years is more common in children whose mothers were very worried about weight gain at 4 months and rushed to start solids. These mothers later more often had to pressure their children to eat (Cassells et al., 2014).
Even if the baby is already 6–8 months old, insisting on large portions of solids out of fear that they are not eating enough only makes things worse.
Aversion can be overcome
3–5 daysuntil the first noticeable changes
2–4 weeksis usually needed to bring back normal feeds
The foundation is responsive feeding. This means feeding in response to the baby’s hunger and fullness cues and trusting their innate self-regulation. Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility in feeding helps here:
- parents decide what, where and when the baby eats
- the baby decides how much to eat and whether to eat at all right now
Focus on the quality of feeding, not the quantity.
A team of specialists
Overcoming a feeding aversion requires a team of specialists: this greatly increases the chances of success. Ideally, every specialist involved should be familiar with the specifics of aversive feeding behaviour in babies.
- A paediatrician or other doctor — to rule out medical causes
- A feeding specialist — to work on the aversion itself
- A psychologist — to work with parental anxiety
Sometimes other specialists are needed too. The longer the refusal lasts, the harder it is to resolve, so it’s better not to wait.
How we work
- 1Request
Before we start, you describe the difficulties you are facing and how feeds go, and include your baby's age and any health issues. If you have videos and a feeding schedule, you send them too.
- 2Online consultation
We look at why your baby refuses to eat, what factors have contributed and how to remove or compensate for them, what pressure is and why it has to be removed. Together we make a plan: when and how to offer feeds, what volumes and with what intervals.
- 3Support
After the consultation, support continues in the messenger: you keep a feeding diary and send a video of every feed to the chat, I watch them and suggest what to change, whether there was pressure and how to avoid it in your situation. I'm in touch every day (audio, video, messages) for up to 10 days, including the day of the consultation.
Yulia Klimanova
Child feeding consultant, specialist in paediatric feeding problems and feeding disorders
- Breastfeeding, formula feeding and weaning consultant
- SOS Trained Feeding Therapist
- Member of the international association of lactation specialists RuLacta
- Working with children’s feeding and eating difficulties since 2019
- Author of programmes, intensives and webinars for parents on starting solids and feeding children over one year
- Co-author of the “Infant Feeding Aversion” course for professionals
- Head of the non-profit Family and Motherhood Support Centre “KDMILK”
Support under the feeding aversion programme — from 30,000 roubles.
For professionals: “Infant Feeding Aversion” training
We run a course for professionals: how to work with babies who refuse to feed from a bottle and help their families bring back calm feeds. The course is taught in Russian.
26 Octoberstart
4 weeksof training
48 hoursand a certificate
During the course you will:
- learn up-to-date, detailed information about bottle refusal
- learn how to help families with babies who have stopped eating
- practise on real cases from the course authors
Who it is for: professionals who work with babies and face bottle refusal but don’t know how to help — doctors, psychologists, breastfeeding, weaning and sleep consultants, child nutrition specialists.
Reviews
Reviews translated from Russian.
We came to Yulia close to despair. My baby completely refused to eat while awake, and his daily milk intake had dropped to a catastrophic 350 ml. Fear, guilt and helplessness — that is what we came with.
Our work lasted 10 days. Yulia worked with us remotely and was available almost all the time, despite the 9-hour time difference, answering all my anxious questions quickly and adjusting what we did. It gave me an incredible sense of confidence: you are not alone in this difficult situation.
The result exceeded all expectations. We managed not just to increase the volumes but to settle the feeding routine itself. Feeds became calm, predictable and, most importantly, stopped being a source of stress for the whole family. Thanks to Yulia’s advice I began to understand my baby’s cues and realised a simple but very important thing: my baby KNOWS how much he needs. The outcome? Now he eats MORE while awake than he used to in a whole day!
If you are facing aversion, food refusal or falling volumes — don’t wait and don’t experiment on your own. Don’t listen to doctors with their “your child must eat as much as the norms say”, don’t push, don’t force — the baby knows how much he needs. 🙏 I am endlessly grateful for the help!
We ran into aversion at 2 months.
We tried to solve the problem for a very long time, 4 months, going from doctor to doctor, and nobody could understand why the baby refused formula. Whatever doctors we saw and whatever we tried, nothing worked in the end.
By a miracle we found you and started working with you. Honestly, we had no hope left that anyone could help, but the miracle happened and you helped us enormously — I will never stop thanking you.
Everything went well, you were always in touch, explained everything, and I really liked that; every question got a thorough answer.
In this time we achieved a very good result: the baby eats and has become much calmer, she is not afraid of the bottle and even asks for it three times a night 🫶❤️❤️
I will always recommend you. Besides the work itself, you gave real support to the baby’s mum, and that helped me a lot — I became much more relaxed myself.
Now everything is wonderful ❤️🥹🥹
Huge thanks from me, my husband and our little girl for really helping us solve this problem. Because it was very acute — it got to the point where they almost wanted to hospitalise us with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa and put her on a feeding tube. I was in such a daze, but over these days I truly felt that I am a mum! Feeding is no longer stressful, you can actually enjoy it — no more constant screaming and crying, but real smiles from the baby. Working with you changed our whole way of life, because honestly it was awful. First terrible colic, then a terrible allergic reaction. The baby would take 30–40 ml and then scream horribly, with a tense tummy and everything else. That happened at about half of the feeds. Then it got worse and worse, until we couldn’t feed her while she was awake at all.
Thank you so much. This is truly an enormous contribution you make to people’s lives. I didn’t know such specialists even existed. We searched for a long time and came across you, because there really are very few specialists like this. Thank God there are you and specialists like you. Thank you. Simply huge thanks.
Let me start by saying that my baby gradually began refusing the bottle while awake: at first she would take 30 ml and then scream wildly, then she stopped eating while awake altogether — only in deep sleep, and even then with difficulty. I tried feeding on demand but she refused the bottle; this went on for about 2 months and kept getting worse. Before we started I was afraid that nothing would work, that I wouldn’t be able to change anything and it would go on forever. But Yulia earned my trust, I put myself completely in her hands and tried to follow all the recommendations. Yes, the first days were hard, but not as hard as I had imagined. All my questions were answered; everything was explained competently and clearly — what my baby needs and when. Did we get results? Yes, we did!!! Even more than I could have imagined. Thank you so much for the support :)))) If anyone I know ever faces something similar, I will certainly recommend working with Yulia.
Prices
Infant feeding aversion
Programme with daily supportConsultation of 60–90 minutes + up to 10 days of daily support
30,000 ₽