10 month old only wants milk at night- help needed please!

[fallollop]

10 month old DS is BF and eats 3 meals a day. In the last couple of months his sleep has been steadily getting worse. Situation now is that during the day I can hardly feed him anything before he struggles and wriggles and takes himself off to have a good old shout at me, (also, daytime naps have become minuscule) but in the night he's waking up 4+ times and having huge feeds.

I know he's still so small, babies are unpredictable etc, but this situation has me at my wits end - I feel as though there's no break from it. And things seem to be getting worse and worse. Please, does anyone have any advice?

Anybody?

Night weaning via controlled crying? Probably not what you want to hear, but you need him to learn that (all being well) night time is for sleep and daytime is for eating/drinking. My 11 month old hasn’t fed at night since she was 7 months and she’s happy, healthy and not psychologically damaged or starved.

How do we go about that? By controlled crying do most people mean leaving them to have a whinge until they settle themselves? Unfortunately when he wakes in the night he's literally screaming (and is the loudest baby I've ever heard 😣). Should we be going in and trying methods other than feeding to settle?

I know it’s very divisive on here, but Gina Ford talks some sense on this issue that I found helpful when I was at my wits end around 6 months in. In my experience (your baby is in all likelihood different), as soon as we got her daytime feeds up to a certain level, we felt confident allowing her to cry for controlled periods at night as she was waking from habit rather than hunger. It took about two days before she stopped waking for milk. Again, this worked for us but it’s not universal.

By now, you’re probably aware of the different types of cries your son has. Listen and if it is just grump, leave him for two mins, four mins, six mins etc. But my daughter cried pretty much non-stop for the first five months of her life (reflux), so I was used to it and could bear it, whereas I know it’s not as easy for all parents, especially those whose babies don’t cry as much.

Just realise I didn’t actually answer your question!

So we would wait for the interval, then go in and stroke her face until she calmed a little, tell her we loved her but it was time to sleep, then leave the room again. And wait for a slightly longer interval and repeat this until she was asleep again.

One massive advantage of doing this is if she now wakes in the night and cries for us, we know something is wrong and rush to her straight away. For example, her room is super hot at the moment, so she sometimes gets too hot and therefore is upset, so we remove a layer, crank up the fan etc.

Oh god don’t do controlled crying, it’s brutal.
I’m on my 3rd bf baby and they are just too damend distracted to feed much during the day. Have you thought about trying a bottle of formula - try and get a bottle in during the day as well as breastfeeds, and a bottle at bedtime? This has helped me