Dream feeding: did it work for you?

[TiredButTrying84]

Context: LO is 6 weeks old, and while I’m not expecting them to sleep through yet, I’m trying to establish some good sleep habits early on.

LO usually goes down around 8pm on a good night, and we’ve been dream feeding around 10 or 11pm (even tried midnight) hoping it would help LO (and us!) get a longer stretch. But they still wake around 2am every night without fail—no matter what time we do the dream feed—and again around 4 or 5am. (I know that’s actually pretty good for 6 weeks so I’m definitely not moaning!)

Last night, we skipped the dream feed to see if it was really helping or maybe even disrupting LO’s sleep. LO went down at 8pm and still woke at 2am, so it doesn’t seem to be making much difference either way.

LO has always had strong, healthy weight gain, so waking every 3 hours to feed isn’t necessary if they want to sleep longer. They have feeds every 2 to 3 hours during the day.

Has anyone found that dream feeding didn’t help or maybe even disrupted their LO’s sleep? Did you end up dropping it, or did it start working better as they got a bit older?

Didn't make a difference whatsoever.

I wouldn’t bother tbh, it’ll all go to shit when they hit the 4m sleep regression anyway (speaking as a mum of two with my second now 4.5 months 😂).

Dreamfeeding did however work for my first baby, but when he was older, if I remember rightly 5-7months. We used to do at 10:30pm and he’d then go to 3am. They’re too little at the moment.

I read an interesting article once that wasn't in favour of it..along the lines of you're messing with baby's natural hunger cues feeding it when it hasn't called for it..I had never felt it was a good thing and this made sense to me, I've never done it. Those stretches are really good, their stomachs can only hold so much at this point. I agree, it will all go to crap when weaning, teething, separation anxiety kicks in so enjoy the peace between the stretches now!

No difference whatsoever

We just go off the baby. Although if I feel too full in the night I take any little cue as a hint. My baby is 14 weeks old. There’s no set time for her really, it’s unpredictable but typically two stretches of 4-5hrs maybe. Some nights though she will be fed at 9pm and then want another mini feed at 11/12 but I wouldn’t say it’s a dream feed because she wakes up and has a nappy change.

For my first it did, so we'd give the dream feed around 11 before we'd go to bed, and then she'd only wake at about 3 for a feed - which we alternated, so we were never tired! Bliss. This was from roughly 6-12m ish. Then it stopped working and sleep got a lot worse for the next few years.

With my second door was never asleep long enough to try 😂

6 weeks is tiny though. It's it doesn't work, stop, but try again in a month or so as things change rapidly at that age.