To think it’s not the end of the world if he feeds to sleep

[KonaMum]

DS is 12 weeks old and a great nighttime sleeper (sleeps at least 6 hours in one go every night, wakes for one feed and will settle himself if he stirs at other times) but his naps are a bit all over the place and at times he gets really overtired and grumpy. He has improved in the last couple of weeks but it’s still a struggle some days and there is no pattern or reliability. He would never just be put into a cot and go to sleep!

Someone on a group I’m in mentioned the Tracy Hogg EASY routine. Now in theory this is just what I was looking for - a routine but still flexible enough that I’m not enforcing anything strict or unreasonable. However DS will only feed to sleep or fall asleep in the sling. If I tried to get him to nap in his cot when he was still awake (no matter how many sleep signals he was giving me) he would just wiggle about until he got bored or overtired and then cry. He definitely would not fall asleep and no amount of shh-ing or patting would change that! Coincidentally - everyone says to pat baby’s back, how do you do this if they are lying in the cot?!

My plan for the time being is a feed, sleep, wake routine as he falls to sleep on the boob approximately half the time anyway and is getting better at being transferred into his cot, and any time he stays awake or wakes up mid-cot transfer, I’ll just pop him in the sling as he’ll almost definitely fall asleep then and at least he’s making that sleep time connection.

I’m really aware though that people seem to think feeding to sleep is this awful habit that you need to discourage. Why? Am I missing something?

I think nature intended for us to feed our babies to sleep. I always did with both of mine until they were toddlers. They’re in secondary school now and they sit in bed reading before going to sleep just fine. I think our society has gone a bit nutty over making babies and small children “independent”.

"I think nature intended for us to feed our babies to sleep"

It's what all other mammals do.....

DS fed to sleep until I went back to work when he was 9 months old. It was massively easier than getting him to sleep any other way so I just kept doing it. He still sometimes wants to feed if it's me putting him to sleep, but will settle for his dad just fine. We didn't bother with routines at all until 6 months though.

Why would I wake my baby, just so he can go to sleep awake?
When feeding to sleep is the easiest, gentlest path to slumber.
Why not comfort my crying child?
Why not carry my precious cargo close in a sling?
Why put my baby down to bed before he is tired, when holding and snuggling is the best feeling in the world for both of us?
He is not little for long enough.
Why wish it away?
Why train, resist, form, push?
Why not let my baby be...
Be close, be held, be fed for as little or long as he likes.
It seems natural to me.
I love having my tiny baby close.
It never occurred to me to ask advice about if this were right.
Why wouldn't it be?
Let us be
Natural and free
And so happy in our cocoon of love and warmth.
Until he grows and flies away
Too soon for me.

I've never understood this.

How exactly do you not feed a baby to sleep? My dd slept after every feed for the first four months, and naturally fell asleep after her evening feed. Is the idea that you are supposed to wake them up?

And if you put them down awake, don't they just gurgle and play about for a bit before starting to cry because it's got boring?

Your baby is sleeping 6 hours at night. Do not break this magic spell by futzing with anything!

Babies fall asleep when feeding/fed. It is not a terrible thing. You sound like you're doing great.

Be prepared to hear many opinions about every aspect of being a parent/raising a child. On some occasions you will hear or learn something useful to you. But be prepared to disregard many of them!

No. Perfectly normal and nice for you both. Just make sure you go for a wee before being stuck under the sleeping baby though! Enjoy - these lovely sleepy times don't last forever. X

doone I remember many times needing a wee or a snack after a baby fell asleep on me while feeding - I’ve fed two babies more or less continuously for nearly 4.5 years and I still haven’t learned!

I love feeding DS2 to sleep and will do out as long as he wants it. I appreciate it all the more as unfortunately it wasn't good for DS1; it seemed to worsen his silent reflux to have a feed just before lying down/reclining, so I had him nap in the sling on my back until he was able to turn himself over both ways in bed, so he was safe to tummy sleep, and then rocked him slightly as he lay in his cot or patted his back or bum until he fell asleep. That was a lot more effort.

We fed to sleep for as long as DS was in the Next to Me and that was possible.

There was then a really awful transition to cot where I couldn’t reach my boob in to feed him to sleep, but if I fed him to sleep on the bed and transferred him he would wake up and scream.

Then we went through about six months of him screaming himself to sleep while we patted his back ineffectively (picking him up just prolonged it, he fell asleep when he gave up struggling after 15mins or so.

He now waves night night and happily goes to sleep without us in the room. Most of the times, sometimes I have to lie next to the cot for a bit. But it has taken 18months to get to this stage, so ignore parenting books that say you should be doing this from six weeks. Total nonsense unless you have an extremely placid and independent child.

The health visitor informed me that before they’re six months old babies are completely unable to manipulate for attention. When they cry it’s becsuse they genuinely need something, they’re not doing it to attention seek and you simply cannot spoil such a small baby- they don’t understand emotions on that level yet.

Feeding to sleep is completely normal, I’ve never bought into this self soothing crap.

I have a 10 month old who mostly fed to sleep at night until he was 8 months or so. In the day it was in the buggy. Then his Dad figured out how to settle him without boob. However he rarely sleeps longer than 2.5 hours at a stretch, he’s in our bed half the night and today I am knackered. I kind of wish we hadn’t fed to sleep but it was the only way that worked for so long. I’ve got good at ninja cot transfers but I feel like he thinks he needs to feed to settle. Sometimes I manage to settle him in cot by basically hanging over the rail and enveloping him. He has never ever fallen to sleep alone with us - he will at childminders.

Sometimes I appreciate the nighttime feeds, sometimes I am completely touched out and feel like chewing my own arm off rather than feed again. This particularly on unsettled/ teething/ when I have my period nights.

I think feeding needs to work for both parties. There was a shift developmentally in the past couple of months that made me feel we could try different approaches. I could not have when he was little. He was never a candidate for sleep training then - I do wonder if he might be as he gets older. but I’m still feeding to sleep a lot and he’s still not sleeping longer but hey, my partner can settle him, his bedtime is less protracted (usually) and we sometimes get 3 whole hours....

It's not the end of the world to feed a baby to sleep if it works for you.

It is also sometimes necessary to break that habit if the baby keeps waking up to sleep or if you need somebody else to be able to settle the baby.

You can't 'spoil' a baby and I also think lots of books talk far too much about 'getting into bad habits' when babies change so much in their first year that any 'habit' won't last for long.

However you also can't function as a parent if you can't sleep.

My babies were happy to be fed to sleep but other people could manage to get them to sleep easy enough. I just think they knew that I was the one with the milk and wouldn't accept not having any!

It's a very useful tool as they get more mobile too. No matter how bouncy they were when they were tired, 5 minutes of milk and they'd be zonked. Twas amazing.

Look at The No Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantly. She does a move to get them to unlatch known as The Pantly Pull -Off. It’s soecficall to break the feeding to sleep thing.

Specifically

A six month old can't manipulate either. It takes years before they actually understand the concept of deception which is needed first. People anthropomorphise babies and small children a lot. I realise that's not the right term as they are human, but they assume all kinds of adult feelings and motivations which are so far removed from reality.

I totally agree, especially at 12 weeks. Both my DCs fed to sleep until much older with no ill effects (and their baby teeth and adult teeth are fine before anyone mentions it).

At 12 weeks I wouldn’t worry too much, but I personally didn’t like the idea that only my myself and I could be the only person to get that baby to sleep! So we tried other ways too. It worked for us.

(I also quite liked the EASY routine, but only for DC1, it didn’t work for DC2.)

I fed to sleep for a while but then it started to become clear that DS needed it to get back to sleep, so I started gently trying to help him learn to go to sleep on his own. I think some of these techniques may be in the Elizabeth Pantley book mentioned above but I've never read it so I'm not sure how similar they are.

First I used to give him a jostle as I put him down to rouse him (as he got bigger it became impossible not to do that to be honest). Then after a couple of weeks of doing that I started unlatching him just before he fell asleep, putting in a small step such as zipping him into his sleeping bag, turning on the white noise, and then putting him into his cot to fall asleep. If he cried I picked him him up and repeated the same steps.

I did this at the beginning of the night but couldn't really do any of it for night wakings as it was pretty much impossible not to feed him to sleep. As soon as he had finished feeding he was zonked out.

It definitely helped, and didn't involve leaving him to cry, so I'd recommend giving it a try. DS probably wouldn't have been able to do it before about 4 months but after that he managed it quite well. It's amazing really, they're lying there wide awake for five or ten minutes and you think there is no chance of them ever going to sleep, and then by some miracle they do!

@BertramKibbler why the unnecessary dig? Actually, I don’t want to know. It’s a nice thread for mothers to provide support and kind advice. Your dig is so strange as there was nothing smug in that post - it’s clear you have an issue.

I wasted my daughter’s first year worrying about this and so wished I hadn’t. When I went back to work she happily fell asleep for other people.

She’s over 2 now and I still feed to sleep at night. Sometimes she’s gone in less than a minute. She can also settle herself if she wakes at night and I don’t want to feed her.

Please don’t let this perfectly natural process worry you. Breast milk is designed by nature for this very purpose.

I think it's only an issue if your baby becomes so used to feeding to sleep that they need to feed during the night when they wake up a bit instead of settling on their own.

Boobs are great and boobs are easy. The milk is literally made to help send them to sleep. Why over complicate it because suddenly people have decided that it's bad for a baby to fall asleep on their mother. My daughter is 15 months and has almost self weaned...im dreading not having a fail safe guaranteed way to get her to sleep fat full and Happy!

Mine fed to sleep when they were tiny. Around 5 months they started waking up multiple times when I transferred then to the crib so it was not effective anymore and we did the shush pat type thing to help them self settle.