Sippy cups are a staple of modern parenting. A commonly used transitional drinking cup for toddlers, it solves a simple problem: you’re told to stop using bottles at one year, but toddlers are a mess. They are bad at drinking from open cups, and those are hardly a solution when you’re out and about.
A sippy cup is structured to make it hard to spill — the mouthpiece is tipped up and the child sucks to get water out, but (usually) if you just drop it, it doesn’t go everywhere. So far, so great. Sounds like a win.
But! The internet offers cautionary tales. Take the article “Why Your Toddler’s Sippy Cup Should Come with a Warning Label” or, even better, “The Hidden Dangers of Baby Bottles, Pacifiers and Sippy Cups.” Are these panic headlines, or is there something to the sippy cup dangers? And if not a sippy cup, what other solutions are there?
What is the sippy cup concern?
We know the value of the cup: fewer spills.
On the flip side, what’s the worry? Basically, it’s twofold. First, there is the problem of cavities. If you fill your child’s sippy with juice or soda and they are constantly sucking on it, there is a lot of opportunity for sugar to get on their teeth. Cavities are most likely to form when sugars stay on the teeth for a long time. The best way to avoid this is to use sippy cups only for water.
In general, the recommendation is that young kids drink only milk and water. This isn’t always realistic, and I believe the evidence on the dangers of juice is overstated. On the other hand, keeping juice out of the sippy cup may be a good idea purely on the grounds that it will result in sticky mold (trust me).
The other concern — less avoidable — is that use of a sippy cup will interfere with mouth development, related to either ability to eat other foods or speech. Sippy cup usage is claimed to produce problems with mouth breathing, face shape, and other issues.
Are sippy cup concerns supported by evidence?
The basic concern about sippy cups is rooted in the mechanics of how swallowing develops. Infants swallow using a “suckle-swallow” pattern, where the tongue moves liquid or food from the front to the back of the mouth. At around a year, a more adult swallowing pattern develops, where the tongue tip moves to the top of the mouth and then food is propelled with a tongue wave into the back of the mouth.
This adult swallowing pattern is important for eating foods with different textures and for developing speech (not language — this has nothing to do with understanding — but the mechanisms of producing understandable speech).
Why would a sippy cup affect this? The mechanics of using a sippy cup involve using the suckle-swallow pattern common in infancy, not the more adult swallow pattern. The idea is that if a child uses a sippy cup too much, it could impede this development. A similar problem could arise with prolonged pacifier use.
These facts about the mechanics of drinking with a sippy cup and the general swallowing patterns are true statements about how swallowing works. And speech pathologists who work with children with speech or swallowing issues point anecdotally to the possible links with sippy cups.
Having said this: we do not have any large-scale data (or even small sale) linking sippy cup usage to speech or swallowing difficulties. That is to say, if you were looking for a study that showed that children who use sippy cups are more likely to lisp, or less likely to eat a variety of foods, you would not find it. Moreover, millions and millions of children use sippy cups, and for the most part they have typically developing speech and swallowing patterns. If the effect of sippy cups was meaningful, we’d see it more directly.
In the end, there may be theoretical concerns about constant sippy cup usage, but the data does not seem to me to support a banishment of sippy cups altogether. They are a convenient way to keep kids hydrated, which is also important.
Is there any alternative?
The alternative to a sippy cup is to move directly to a straw. Speech pathologists tend to encourage this because of the concerns about sippy cups discussed above.
The downside of straw cups is that kids often have a harder time learning to use them. The mechanism of drinking from a straw is less natural, and it can take them more time to get used to it. Hydration is important! There are tradeoffs, especially if your child does not take easily to the straw. (If they do, there are many excellent straw cups out there that are largely leakproof.)
An upside of their learning to use a straw is that it makes you a lot more flexible. If you forget your kid’s cup, usually you can find a straw. Beyond this, straw usage enables further transitions. We eventually moved our entire family (including me and Jesse) to use identical Nalgene bottles, which we identify with Name Bubbles labels. It’s only slightly awkward when people at work ask me why my water bottle has a giant sticker with my name on it.
Thanks on this post to speech language pathologist Sara Toogood.
Community Guidelines
Log in
If the idea is that continuing to suckle-swallow past a year is an issue, why is it not a problem for toddlers who continue to breastfeed? Is there a significant difference between nursing and a bottle?