When to switch from a bottle to a sippy cup

Why there are two dates, not one

Almost every argument about sippy cups comes from treating "when can my baby use a cup" and "when should my baby stop using bottles" as the same question. They are months apart and they have different answers.

The first is a skill. Drinking from a cup is a motor skill that takes practice, and practice should start long before the cup has to carry any of the day's nutrition. Around six months, when solids start, is the usual point — the same milestone the AAP's starting solid foods guidance describes. A small amount of water in a cup at mealtimes, most of it ending up on the tray, is exactly what success looks like at this stage.

The second is a handover. Around a baby's first birthday, when whole milk or continued breastfeeding replaces formula as the drink, the bottle itself stops having a job. Prolonged bottle use past this point is associated with tooth decay and with iron deficiency from drinking milk in place of eating, which is why most guidance wants bottles gone by around eighteen months.

Which cup: spouted, straw or open

There are three real options and the classic hard-spout sippy is the least recommended of them. A hard spout works much like a bottle nipple: the child sucks, the tongue pushes forward, and the oral pattern you are trying to move on from is reinforced. Speech and dental professionals generally prefer a straw cup or an open cup for that reason.

Open cup. Best for oral development, worst for your floor. Use a tiny one, fill it with a centimetre of water, and accept the mess at meals.

Straw cup. The practical compromise most families land on. It encourages a mature swallow, it travels, and a weighted straw works at any angle.

Spouted sippy. Tidiest, and genuinely useful in a car or a stroller. Treat it as a spill-control device rather than a developmental step, and use a soft spout rather than a hard one if you use one at all.

A note on what we are not doing here: we do not keep sippy cups in our product registry, so we are not going to rank cups we have not researched to the standard we apply to everything else. What we can usefully tell you is which bottles make the handover easier, which is what the picks below are.

What to look for when you buy

1. A straw or soft spout over a hard spout. If you are buying one cup, buy a straw cup.
2. Few parts, and no hidden valve. Anti-spill valves are mould traps and they make sucking harder than a straw needs to be. Fewer pieces also means fewer things to lose.
3. Small volume. A 7oz cup encourages grazing on milk all day, which is the habit the switch is meant to break. Small cups, at meals.
4. Dishwasher-safe, top rack. You are about to own several.
5. A brand whose bottle you already use, if you can. Several major bottle ranges sell cups alongside the bottles, so collars, brushes and sterilizer baskets you already own keep being useful. Check the maker's own page for what fits what before assuming parts interchange.
6. Nothing that needs a new sterilizer. Cups are washed, not sterilized, for a baby of this age — see when to stop sterilizing baby bottles.

How to do the switch without a fight

One feed at a time, over two to three weeks. Pick the feed your baby is least attached to — usually a daytime one — and offer the cup at that feed instead of the bottle for several days before dropping the next. Keep the order, the place and the person the same; it is the ritual the baby is attached to as much as the bottle.

Leave the bedtime bottle until last, and when you do drop it, move the drink earlier in the routine so it stops being the thing that sends them to sleep. A bottle in bed is the specific habit the dental guidance is worried about, so it is worth separating drink from sleep before you worry about the container.

Expect a dip in milk intake for a week or two. A cup is slower and more effortful than a bottle, and that is partly the point. What matters is that overall intake across food and drink stays reasonable; if you are unsure, that is a conversation with your pediatrician rather than a reason to go back to bottles. Bottle-side context is in when to replace baby bottles and how much milk should a newborn drink.

When it is going wrong

They refuse the cup entirely. Change the cup type before you change the plan — a lot of babies who reject a hard spout take a straw immediately. Offer it when they are thirsty but not desperate, and let them hold it themselves.

They will drink water but not milk from it. Common. Put a very small amount of milk in the cup at a meal where food is the main event, rather than trying to replace a milk feed outright.

They take it from a caregiver but not from you. Also common, and it is the same mechanism as bottle refusal from a nursing parent. Have someone else offer it for a few days — the pattern is described in baby won't take a bottle.

You are past eighteen months and still on bottles. Not a disaster, and very common. Go cold on daytime bottles first and keep offering a cup at every meal. Ask your pediatrician or dentist if you are worried about teeth.