Sorry for the long post, but feeding has completely taken over our lives for the past 7 months and this seemed like the one subreddit where people might actually understand what I mean. Hopefully this post also helps another family in a similar situation catch the problem earlier than we did. I honestly think bottle aversion is often misunderstood, minimized, or mixed together with reflux/oral motor issues in ways that make everything much harder to untangle.
Our son was born IUGR and hypotonic. He was around the 3rd percentile at birth and spent time in the NICU because he basically could not suck/feed properly at first. Things improved enough for discharge, but feeding never really became “normal”. Over the following months his weight slowly drifted lower percentile-wise and I started feeling like something was off. At one point he dropped to around the 0.1 percentile adjusted, and meanwhile some doctors barely seemed interested in his actual intake, trends or growth curves. This situation probably hit some sensitive fibers in me too, because I was born at 32 weeks weighing 1.65 kg, and while my case was completely different, I know my parents also went through hell for a long time.
I’m an engineer, so I did what engineers do and started tracking things. I bought a pediatric scale, started tracking ml intake, calories, weight trends and corrected WHO growth curves myself because almost nobody here adjusts properly for prematurity/IUGR. I even used Cursor to vibe-code a small app so both me and my wife could log feeds and weights from our phones. Honestly one of the most frustrating parts of this whole thing has been doctors either refusing to look at the data, dismissing it, or acting almost uncomfortable that I had it. At that point in time I was seeing days where calorie intake was too low for his weight (sometimes only 60–70% of his estimated requirement) and I felt like either nobody cared or nobody truly understood.
We went through multiple pediatricians, neurologists, feeding specialists/SLPs, a GI, nutrition-focused doctors and early intervention therapists, and honestly we are exhausted. It feels like our entire life became appointments, feeding schedules and conflicting opinions. On top of the feeding issues, we also have ongoing occupational therapy appointments for mild hypotonia/motor concerns. Some doctors were reassuring, some dismissive, and some honestly made things emotionally worse. One pediatrician even told us she suspected Moebius syndrome, and when we said other doctors completely disagreed she basically replied “well, he must have something, his face looks weird”. I know now she was wrong and probably reacting badly after being challenged, but I got really angry and mad after that, which felt as a huge lack of respect coming from a doctor.
At some point the GI suspected reflux and we switched to AR formula. For a while it genuinely felt like we had solved it. Intake improved a lot, feeds became calmer, weight gain improved and life became more normal again. But then slowly things started getting bad again, except now in a much more confusing way. We realized he is EXTREMELY sensitive to nipple flow and formula thickness. If the nipple is slightly too slow he gets tired or frustrated. If it gets slightly faster he gets disorganized and upset. AR formula also changes thickness over time, so sometimes a nipple works for a few days and then suddenly the exact same setup stops working because the flow changed. Some days he drinks relatively okay semi asleep, but awake feeds can become a battle.
At home both me and my wife are basically fully devoted to feeding him. I don’t think family or even doctors fully understand what that means. Every outing, every nap, every wake window revolves around feeds. And at some point I think the pressure around intake became huge for all of us. Our main pediatrician is what I jokingly call a “good times pediatrician” because she almost never intervenes in anything. Eye infection? “Let’s wait.” Weight percentile drifting down? “Let’s wait.” Low intake? “Feed on demand.” Meanwhile we are trying to process completely different opinions from every specialist we see while living this 24/7.
Recently we saw another SLP/feeding specialist who actually gave us a more reassuring perspective. She said she did not see obvious signs of aspiration or severe swallowing dysfunction, and that his solids actually looked relatively good for his age. She suggested we may need to stop treating the bottle as the only thing that matters and focus more on calorie-dense solids while reducing pressure around feeds.
And weirdly, solids often do go much better than bottles. He does surprisingly well with things like formula + egg yolk pudding/flan, avocado + banana, peanut butter mixed appropriately, meat + squash purées, oatmeal mixes, etc. Today for example his bottle intake alone looked terrible, but after solids he probably ended much closer to his calorie target than we initially thought.
So now I honestly don’t even know where reflux ends and bottle aversion begins. Maybe there was reflux at first, but now the emotional/behavioral side became part of it too. Maybe we accidentally made feeding more stressful by chasing textbook volumes for months. I really don’t know anymore.
Now, my questions for you: did anyone here go through something similar? Babies who fed better asleep, were hypersensitive to nipple flow, had reflux diagnoses that only partially explained things, had mild oral motor issues, did better with solids than bottles, or got stuck in this horrible cycle of pressure, low intake and anxiety? Did your baby eventually outgrow it? Did solids become the bridge while bottles slowly improved later?
Honestly this whole experience has been brutal mentally.