Would it be madness to start doing a dreamfeed at 4 months?

[Holymoly321]

DS2 is 4mths and excl bf - won't take a bottle or a dummy - GRRR!. Anyway, he normally goes down around 7pm and then wakes bet 11 and 12 for a feed, then again around 3.30am. I;m wondering whether I should start doing a dream feed around 10.30 in a bid for him to go a bit longer at night so that I wouldn't have to be going to bed at 7.30 every night just to get a bit of sleep. Any thoughts?

[TheJen]

I started a dreamfeed at 4 months as my ds stopped sleeping through. It worked for us- was a bit stressful though as soon after he started waking up for it and I started to resent it a little because I had to rush back early just incase he woke if we went out (wasn't very often!) It was a little tricky to stop but we managed to drop it by 9 months and while we were doing it I liked going to sleep knowing he wasn't hungry and usually he slept well only waking at 6.30-7 for morning feed. You could try it for a few nights and see if it breaks his pattern of waking- feeding at 12 and 3 is killing- two sleepy feeds is exhausting. Good luck

[insywinsyspider]

i would try it and see what happens - ds2 is now 14 wks (ex bf so far) we tried it around 12 wks and it made naff all difference, sorry not very positive and maybe we needed to stick at it a bit longer but I found it hard to stay up till 10 only to get up again at 1 - hope someone comes along with some better advice!

[sparklyshoos]

DS is now 13mo and only just starting to sleep through. we actually think his sleep was so poor due to the dreamfeed - it works really well for some babies, but for others it just actually encourages them to wake more frequently. What we found was DS was never really hungry enough to take a full feed, so woke more often as a result. - We ended up with 1-2 hourly wakings at one stage, so we definitely won't be doing a dream feed next time. I would advise against it and just let him tell you when he's hungry, but there are plenty of people it's worked really well for. 4 months is classic growth spurt time, so you may find it all settles down in a week or two anyway.

[TheJen]

I might be contradicting myselg but I have to agree with sparkly actually, even though we did it and it sort of worked for us, I'm not sure I'd do it again. 4 months is a growth spurt so if you can hang on it might be worth waiting it out and sticking to your LO's natural rhythm.

[TiddlerTiddler]

I think I am with Sparkly on this one. I found it has made him wake up more frequently. It worked like a dream (so to speak!) with DC1 though, so I also think it very much depends on the baby.

But I found that it was very bad for my sleep because by the time I stayed up to do the feed and then get ready for bed I was depriving myself of sleep because he would wake up at 1am anyway.