This week I had the most amazing conversation about teaching babies to drink from an open cup with EZPZ’s Pediatric Feeding Specialist and Speech and Language Pathologist, Dawn Winkelmann! Dawn has many years of experience in the field, helping babies learn to eat and meet developmental mouth milestones.
You guys know I love all things about baby development and I absolutely loved my conversation with Dawn! She offered SO Much amazing information about baby’s development in regards to open cup drinking. Fun fact: Dawn designed EZPZ’s Tiny Cup, which is a small, open cup specifically designed to help babies learn to drink from an open cup. And that is exactly what we do in Montessori! We offer the cup as soon as the child starts their solid food journey.
I have used EZPZ’s Tiny Cup for MANY years now and seriously couldn’t recommend it more! And I’m grateful to share that EZPZ is partnering with our Montessori Babies Podcast! Check out EZPZfun.com to discover all the amazing (baby formulated) feeding products they have! And use the code Montessoribabies10 at checkout for 10% off of your order!
I highlighted some of Dawn’s amazing pieces of advice from our show, Tips to Teaching Babies to Drink From an Open Cup below.
Why should we have babies drink from an open cup versus a sippy or weighted straw cup?
Ms. Dawn said…
“We’re when we’re talking about development, parents usually know gross motor milestones like crawling or walking. But they tend to not know a lot about oral motor milestones, feeding milestones, swallowing milestones, speech milestones, language milestones and all of these milestones, you know, they kind of piggyback on each other.
So it’s really important for parents to understand that if we’re drinking from an open cup, we’re also working on lip closure. When we’re working on lip closure, that’s also a precursor to speech sounds. And then if we’re working on those speech sounds, we’re also a precursor to language and social skills and manners and all these right, all these other things.
And and so that is more along the lines of cognition and Speech and language. So it’s it’s important for parents to kind of understand all of these things and how developmental ties kind of go in together.”
What about babies choking when we introduce the open cup?
Ms. Dawn says…
“And then the last tie in with lip closure is what parents fear the most is choking. And I tell families all the time that if you drink from an open cup, your child is learning how to put their lips together and have a really good lip seal. And that is one of the best ways to be able to prevent choking if you and I were to choke right now, the first thing that we would do is we close our lips really tightly so we could breathe through our nose so that we could produce a strong cough.
If kids aren’t able to do that, if their mouth breathers, which a lot of children who tend to drink from a sippy cup or a 360 Cup tend to be mouth breathers, they don’t have that strong cough, so it’s really hard to again have that airway management to help protect their airway.
So all of these skills happen just From just from drinking from a cup, like it’s just it seems so silly when we. We’re like if you drink from a cup, you can have all the success and all these other areas. But you know, because we’re developmental experts, we know that. But to explain that to a new parent, they’re like their minds are blown. Like, what? So you’re saying all I have to do is practice an open cup, five minutes a day, and I’m like, Yes, that’s all you have to do.”
When should we introduce the cup in infancy?
Ms. Dawn Says…
“So this is always mind blowing for parents and medical professionals. Through EZPZ, I have the beauty of teaching pediatricians, speech, language pathologists, occupational therapists, teachers and then also parents. So it’s this wide community that we have and everyone’s always blown away. You know, pediatricians tend to not have any schooling in feeding, swallowing nutrition.
So we’re looking to them for advice. And so as all of us are disciplines, you know, train pediatricians so that they can refer, right? And even pediatricians are like, what the when and the age is six months. We can start introducing the cup between four and six months of age.
And that is just so mind blowing because we’re like, what? Then I’m always like just going to our Instagram feed and look up our highlights and watch thousands of six month old drinking successfully out of an open Cup. It is a developmental milestone.
So what the developmental milestone states is at six months of age, a baby will drink from an open cup held by an adult. So what that means is we’re not expecting your baby to pick up that cup at six months of age and drink properly with no spillage. That’s not developmental.
But what we are supposed to do is we, as caregivers, are providing the stability because babies are still working on their fine motor skills. Drinking from an open cup is a swallowing milestone. It’s a feeding milestone, so it’s not. It’s a it’s a fine motor milestone in the sense that we have all of the muscles used to trigger a safe swallow our fine motor muscles, but they’re not supposed to actually bring that cup up to their mouth.
So the adult is holding that cup. So the baby just need to come forward towards the cup and drink the liquid out of the cup and be able to do that successfully. Of course, there’s going to be a mess, of course. As you know, it’s going to be this fun, messy opportunity. But just like anything else in parenting, the more that you provide these opportunities, the more skill the child becomes.”
And this was just a small piece of the information that the wonderful Dawn Winkelmann, EZPZ’s amazing Pediatric Feeding Specialist and Speech-Language Pathologist offered in Episode 22 of the Montessori Babies Podcast! Take a listen to the episode to discover all of the amazing benefits that teaching babies to drink from an open cup offers!
And don’t forget to check out EZPZfun.com to discover all the amazing (baby formulated) feeding products they have! Use the code Montessoribabies10 at checkout for 10% off of your order!