Refuses water!!!

Seren (who is now 6months) keeps refusing to drink water!! Does anyone have any tips or ideas how to encourage her to drink water?

Thanks!!!

Gwen xxx

Try giving it to her at different temperatures and see if it makes a difference, some children will only take it warmed or chilled. You could also try a different sort of sipper cup to see if it makes a difference, or is she taking other fluids from the same teat okay, and it's only water that she is fussy about? If it's only water you could try diluting a small amount of fruit-juice in with it to give it a little flavour to get the fluid into her.
Hopefully this is only a phase and won't last!

Kerrie

It took Jacob a really long time to accept water. We too tried giving it to him via different methods, bottle, sipper cup, chilled from the fridge, room temperature etc.

We found that he preferred it ice cold from the fridge and from an open-ended cup LOL. However he's since changed that and prefers it at room temperature and will now drink it from anything.

I thought having breast milk or formula for the first 12 months was all they needed (as well as solids after 6mths)??

We were offering Jacob water from much earlier on, Gemma.

He had it a few times in a bottle when he was Amy's age and definitely when he was on solids.

Thanks Melinda.

We have given Amy water a couple of times to get her to stretch her feeds during the night but I didn't know you could give them water as standard. Our other thought is that she could fill up on water rather than her milk.

So much to learn. Sorry for crashing your post Gwen.

I think it's ok to give them bits of water whenever Gemma, but we always offered Jacob water when he had his solids.

WRT to milk consumption, I think this may be another reason why for a while, you offer the milk before solids IYKWIM? So that the milk remains the primary source of nutrition.

Gemma, the CHN told us that we don't really need to give Kynan water until about 9-12 months I think it was (just to give him another breastfeed if he was thirsty). However, we're going to start giving Kynan a bit of water in his sippy cup soon just to try and get him used to it.