For Munchkin’s third birthday, my in-laws got her a doll that drinks from a bottle and then pees into her diaper. They thought it was really cool because the doll does stuff, but I didn’t want my daughter feeding the doll a bottle. They told me that they had thought of that, but that you can’t really buy a breastfeeding doll, so what option did they have? If a baby doll is going to come with accessories, chances are good that it will come with a bottle.

When Munchkin has gotten dolls such as these as gifts, I have thrown away the bottles and let her keep the dolls. I do not allow doll bottles in my house. I want Munchkin to be socialized that bottles are the exception, not the rule, which I think is the opposite of what general society teaches. I feel that toy bottles normalize bottle-feeding, and I want to normalize breastfeeding.

I do work outside the home and therefore we do use bottles. Munchkin knows that bottles exist and what they are for, and she sees Sweets drinking from bottles at daycare. She also sees me pumping for the bottles and knows that mommy’s milk is in them. We acknowledge the presence of bottles as a way to feed babies, BUT we say that bottles are for when other people feed the baby. I take the approach that is in the Dr. Sears book What Baby Needs: “Or, when Baby is older, Baby might be fed Mommy’s milk from a bottle if Mommy has to be away.” In our family, baby nurses when mommy is around, and when mommy isn’t around, mommy pumps milk for someone else to feed to baby in a bottle. As a result, mommy never feeds the baby with a bottle herself.

When Munchkin is playing dolls, she is pretending to be the mommy, therefore she doesn’t feed the dolls with bottles, she nurses them. I suppose that if she decided that she wanted to play daycare center, then I would be fine with her playing with bottles in that case, but that’s not what she’s playing. Or, if I had boys, I would be fine with daddy feeding baby with bottles too, but I don’t have boys.

Munchkin doesn’t have the magnetic breastfeeding dolls, but she does have two dolls that look alike but are different sizes. She will lay the smaller doll on the bigger doll and tell me that the baby wants milk. Then she’ll put them down and leave them for a while, because I guess it is going to take a while to finish nursing!