How to Dadda
How to Dadda
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Teat

The short definition

A teat is the soft rubber or silicone top of a baby's bottle that bub sucks on. It is sold separately.

What it actually means

The bottle holds the milk. The teat unscrews off the top, and it is the part bub actually uses, and it is a separate consumable. It wears out, it perishes, and it gets replaced while the bottle keeps going.

  • Teats come in different flow rates. A slow-flow teat lets milk out more slowly. A slow-flow teat is part of paced bottle-feeding. That is the technique for letting bub control the feed, rather than the bottle.
  • It is also the part the cleaning rules are about. All teats and bottles get cleaned with a bottle or teat brush, and sterilised until bub is 12 months. The method is to wash in hot soapy water with a brush, then boil for 5 minutes, then let it cool in the saucepan. A teat brush exists because a teat has a hole, a rim and an inside, and a sponge does not reach any of them.
  • What a teat will not fix. There is no evidence that a particular teat helps with a problem such as colic. The shelf will tell him otherwise.

Where Dadda will hear it

On the side of every bottle box, usually next to a number or a label like "0m+" or "slow flow". Also from whoever is washing up, because the teats are the fiddly part.

It is one of the words he will be sent to the shop for, and stand in the aisle guessing at. Bottles and teats are sold both together and apart.

Not to be confused with

  • A dummy. A dummy is for sucking and nothing comes out of it. A teat is on a bottle and milk comes through it.
  • The bottle. A teat is replaced far more often than the bottle it sits on. So it is worth knowing which teats fit which bottle, before the first one splits.

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