Cathedral Palate

KarenG
KarenG Community member Posts: 7 Listener
edited June 2014 in Families and carers
Does anyone have experience of this with a young baby? Teats to use etc to help with sucking

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  • toast
    toast Community member Posts: 46 Listener
    my daughter has this - a high, arched palate. When she was a baby she struggled to feed. She was NG fed at first. We were advised to gently hold her cheeks as she sucked to improve her latch onto the teat. The other thing we were told to do as her sucking was very weak was to use a fast flow teat. I would not recommend this and I don't think its advised anymore. It caused my daughter to aspirate and she was v poorly with pneumonia.
    Have you seen the feeders Medela do? There's a special needs feeder which is more designed for cleft palates but would work in your situation - my understanding is the high arched palate is very similar in shape but still together - daughter's paed described hers as being the stage before cleft palate. I didn't try this myself but heard good things about it.

    I used the Medela soft cup advanced feeder. This is more like cup feeding and is more marketed as something very young babies can use to have expressed breast milk without getting confused by a bottle teat. I liked it very much

    If you copy and paste this link, you can see both on amazon. You can probably get cheaper on ebay:

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=medela+feeder&tag=googhydr-21&index=aps&hvadid=8912376065&hvpos=1o1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=14296318911632131746&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&ref=pd_sl_7j2htmmq0t_b

    Guess other than that its a case of trial and error - finding something that works for you. One thing we found that wasn't very good were the wide neck bottles. The traditional narrow bottles and teats fitted in her mouth much better

    Good luck!

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