To think there is a correlation between babies that wake a ridiculous amount in the night and breastfeeding?

[toomuchpeppapig]

I've seen quite a few threads on here over the last year or so that I've been on here about babies who wake constantly in the night and will only feed to sleep etc. It seems that virtually all (if not all) of these babies are breastfed.

I bottle fed my 2 DCs and although my oldest has never been a great sleeper (now 16 months old), I don't remember him waking as much as many of these posts say. Is it because bottle fed babies sleep better or is it just coincidence?

NB - I have nothing against breastfeeding. I personally tried and failed, and my thinking is that fed is best. This isn't an anti breast feeding post. I'm just wondering if my thinking is correct.

My DD slept through the night from 9 weeks, from 11pm - 7am. She was bottlefed

Paradiselaundry

A lot of co-sleepers assume that every one would just sleep through wakes/feeds, or only rouse slightly. I tried it and found it awful! I was completely woken by every breastfeed, DD expected to simply sleep with my nipple in her mouth at all times and I was absolutely exhausted and unable to function. I couldn't be a good parent sleeping like that.

Not in my experience!

We struggled and limped on with breast and then mixed feeding for 10 weeks before going exclusively to bottle. He was still a SHOCKING sleeper until about 8 months.

I hear people saying this but from my anecdotal knowledge it doesn’t appear to be true.

Plus I’m still happy I breastfed and didn’t have to spend money on milk, worry about sterilizing and deal with reflux and constipation etc. There are so many other benefits of breastfeeding as well.

To be honest this seems to be yet another of the unhelpful myths that put women off breastfeeding, along with not being able to eat normally, consume a drop of alcohol, boobs getting saggy, baby not getting off your boob til he or she is 10 and so on and so on....

Not ime. My dd was bottle fed and was an awful sleeper until she was 3, would only be fed to sleep until a year old... always a huge drama with screaming, pacing and crying until she finally gave in and went to sleep for a painfully short stretch! For a while both me and dh thought we'd never sleep again, i was physically ill even 'sharing' wakes because she was so loud. my bf ds is now 3 months and has predictably woke 3 times a night since a few weeks old, grunts a but then has a 10 minute feed and goes back to sleep.

I know lots of others who have had good and bad sleepers no matter how they feed.
It's the individual baby that makes the difference rather than the feeding and the myth that formula feeding makes a baby sleep through is not helpful.

I also think it's luck of the draw. My DDs were noth breastfed. DD1 slept 10 till 7 from 10 weeks. DD2 not quite so amazing but only fed twice, was a fast feeder and always went straight back down. So two different but both pretty good sleepers.

Yes, I'm still breastfeeding age 1, and I think that it is the main cause of my DD's nightwaking. I want to nightwean but I think I need to take a few days off work to do it as otherwise I'll be shattered.

I bf my daughter for a year and she was a great sleeper and still is. Apparently I was as well.

As soon as she was up to birth weight (2 weeks old) she slept for 4/5 hour blocks only waking briefly to feed.

My experience links with what you are saying - both we breast fed and awful sleepers. They only feel asleep feeding and it took a long time to train then to sleep by putting them down in their cots. Everyone around me bottle fed and would comment on sleeping problems but mostly just the odd bad night...not babies that repeatedly woke up every 2 hours or so.

sorry for typos

Personally I don't think there is a correlation although I think there is a correlation between having a dummy and sleeping better and not having a dummy and not sleeping as well. Not sure if anyone agrees with that? This is just anecdotal though of course! My DD was only breastfed for about 12 weeks, she stopped waking for feeds between about 10/11pm and 5/6am from being around 8/9 weeks old anyway. Stopping breastfeeding had no discernible impact on her sleep. She slept 4hr chunks in the night from birth. Just the way she is. I do think a dummy really helped her to sleep though after I had stopped breastfeeding and I think it really helped her to learn a self soothing technique at a young age which was to use her dummy. In my limited anecdotal experience the biggest differences in sleep have generally between those who have a dummy and those who don't. I think less BF babies have dummies, but I know a few bottle fed babies who don't have dummies and were comparatively bad sleepers and then some BF babies who slept quite well but who had dummies.

MeadowHay my LO never took a dummy, and slept relatively well- slept a lot better after being weaned.

I wouldn't have sacrificed bf my LO as a baby for more sleep- however i draw the line at breastfeeding a toddler.

I think any correlation is because mums who bf into toddlerhood are probably a self-selecting group of people who are less likely to sleep train or withhold milk during the night, rather than anything else.

Certainly, my experience of bf and sleep training (by which I mean making the decision not to provide middle of the night milk most of the time, and sticking to it) was that by about 7 months with one baby and 9 months with the other I was getting a decent chunk of sleep most nights - say from 7pm to 5am. I was happy to feed again in the very early morning, as it settled them down for another hour or two, and I got a lie-in.

Definitely no correlation. Sleeping through the night (and that's generally considered to be 6-8 hours without waking!) is a developmental milestone, same as any other. Is anyone suggesting that breastfeeding has an effect on when a baby sits up? Or starts walking? No, because it's something your baby will learn in their own time when they're ready.

Also, people definitely have unrealistic expectations of how babies sleep. When was the last time you woke up in the night? Lots of adults don't sleep all night, so why should babies? Suggesting that there's something wrong with a baby who wakes in the night (and that formula will magically fix it), no doubt contributes to some mothers giving up breastfeeding before they would like to, just because everyone else at baby group seemingly has a baby that sleeps from 7-7 from 3 weeks old.

I haven't read the whole thread so sorry if I'm repeating something but I think the sleeping thing is down to a few reasons:

a) this is Mumsnet and most posters on here seem to breast rather than bottle feed.

b) people only complain when there's something wrong so you don't often get to read about the babies who sleep 7-7 from just a few weeks old. Instead you read the horror stories of babies who wake every 30 mins.

c) people (on here at least) seem to be afraid of letting their children cry. I'm not in any way suggesting that you leave your baby to scream the place down but some people sound as though they jump up at every wimper and are very resistant to any type of sleep training.

I think it's entirely baby dependent. Some of them sleep, some of them don't. Feed them however you like, won't make much difference!

Studies have actually shown that mothers that ebf get more sleep than those that combi or formula feed.

www.lamaze.org/Connecting-the-Dots/exclusively-breastfeeding-mothers-get-more-sleep-another-look-at-nighttime-breastfeeding-and-postpartum-depression

Not for me. I had one of each - one bad sleeper one very good sleeper. Both bf till about 2.4 months.

Hope.

Always bottlefed from day 1, always terrible sleeper

I dont agree because my dd1 was a greedy baby she would drain a full bottle and insist in a bottle every 3/4 hours she took the piss and was still doing this at one so I thought right missy because she wasnt starving she was greedy and chubby, we stopped the bottle at 2/3am and we simply changed her nappy gave her a cuddle and after 1 week she started to sleep through. Some babys get woken very easily and need help getting back to that state, some are just cheeky like my dd, some have pain like my dd2 was a premie and also lactose intolerant so up every 3 hours starving then puking her formula up and because she had a tiny tum she couldn't have much , that was soul destroying I was relieved when she got diagnosed and put on high calorie lactose free milk

Even if there was a correlation ( I don’t think there is BTW) that doesn’t necessarily equal causation. A friend of mine and I had our first babies within weeks of each other, I EBF my utterly shocking sleeper, her baby was bottle fed and absolutely passive from birth (she’d complain about only getting a 7 hour stretch at night 🤨) and I did sense a certain smugness about the sleeping through and that I was causing the sleep issues by breastfeeding.
Fast forward 18 months, We’ve now stopped breastfeeding and my DC is still a pretty shocking sleeper but her second, again formula fed, may be even worse than mine was!
The moral of the story being - it’s a roll of the dice.

It's only ridiculous if you regard waking at night as something wrong that needs to be fixed.

I totally agree with this. If we were a lot more honest about babies’ needs then it wouldn’t come as such a shock, I think.

Confirmation bias on your part I think. Ds breastfed, sleeps through the night and has done since before 10m. I was breastfed and slept through from 6 weeks.

My cousin has a lb a bit older than Ds and he still wakes for a bottle twice a night.

My children we’re formula fed and I’d say they were definitely more settled babies than the breastfed ones I knew. They only really woke in the night once apart from when teething when they both woke more and wanted milk more often. They both went on to be pretty awful sleepers once they got to about 9 months though which lasted until they were about 4 or 5. 😩

I think anecdotally among my friends some are good sleepers and some are not but there are some general patterns. Generally, a I would say the formula fed babies started sleeping through at an earlier age. Generally. But by 7/8 months it evened out. Either you had a good sleeper or a bad sleeper. The method of feeding didn’t matter.
But then jump to 18 months when the majority had given up breastfeeding (I fed one till 14 months and one for 11 months), the ones who continued breastfeeding had noticeably poorer sleeper till they night weaned.
But then by 2-2.5 it all changed again especially around the time potty training was introduced and they were into the full toddler phase. Once again there were some that were just good sleepers and some that were shocking. So several FF babies that had gone 7-7 at 8 weeks were now refusing to fall asleep or waking up and wandering into their parent’s bed etc. And some people will have intermittent sleep issues till Primary school. The number of kids in my son’s Reception class who needed a parent to be in the room while they fell asleep was pretty high and several woke at least once at night.

My trajectory was this:
DS1 shocking sleeper as a baby. Got better by a year (one night feed). Slept through with not a peep by 14 months (so 7-7). But by 2ish was a really independent sleeper. I could read a book, and say goodnight and leave the room and he would fall asleep on his own and stay in his bed all night and in the morning when he woke up. He’s 8 now and sleeps by 8, sometimes 8:30 and I have to poke him awake in the morning. On weekends he can be asleep till 10 am if I let him!

DS2. Brilliant sleeper as a baby. Only woke every 3-4 hours for a feed as a newborn. Slept longer stretches by 6 months. And could be left to fall asleep independently by 18 months. However has always always been an early waker. I have nipped the 5/5:30 am wake ups in the bud but now at 3 he’s still regularly up at 6:30.

All DC breastfed and all great sleepers (except DC3 who regressed at 9 months and is only getting back into his sleep routine now at 14months). All in bed by 7-9pm and sleep for 12 hours waking only for short feeds and then no feeds at night once on solids.