Anyone given water for a night feed to try to stop it?

[lauraloola]

3mo dd has recently started waking at 3am for a bottle. She is suffering a cold at the moment so Im not sure if this has something to do with it but dp thinks we are getting her into a bad habit in allowing it.

Dp has read somewhere that you should give water for the night feed to discourage lo from waking at this time.

I am not going to this until her cold is cleared up to see if this is the reason.

Has anyone tried this? Is it cruel to take that feed from her if she needs it? Thanks.

[HolidaysQueen]

I definitely wouldn't do anything until after her cold is fully cleared. I'd be dubious about trying the water unless you are 100% certain that the waking is a habit rather than a definite need for food, and even then I'm not sure I would do it. A lot of babies go through growth spurts and neuro development from 3 months which could cause her wakening and need for extra food. I'm not sure I could give a 3mo a bottle of water unless I knew she defiunitely didn't need milk.

My DS is 24 weeks and hasn't been sleeping well at all since he was 3 months old - feeding at 4-5am every night, sometimes earlier as well. A number of friends have been recommending a bottle of water to me as it had worked for them, but I haven't done it as I wanted to see if we could get him to take enough food to see him through the night first before actually denying him milk. He is normally breastfed but gets a bottle at night - we started upping it by 10-20ml each night and found that he would actually take more than the 200ml we were routinely offering. This past week he has been taking 250ml (!) at 10.30pm and finally is going until 7am without another feed - he has woken once for comfort on some nights and other nights we've heard him wake but then resettle himself but I haven't needed to feed him back to sleep for a week now which is amazing to me after so long with night feeds! So I'd be tempted to try a positive approach of offering more milk at the last feed before you denied milk in the night - but don't try and force her to take it, and also be prepared to accept that she may just wake during the night for a while. I think people expect babies to continue sleeping through once they are sleeping through, and it just doesn't seem to work like that in reality

[lauraloola]

Thats what I thought. She usually drinks a whole 5oz bottle when she wakes in the night so if definitely hungry. Maybe I will try her with more milk on her last feed tonight and see what happens. Thanks.