Stopping feeding to sleep

[Armck]

Hello,

please no judgement I’m just after some advice. My nearly 7 month old is exclusively breastfed, I over the past 7 days have stopped feeding her to sleep for her naps. Still feeding to sleep for bed and any night time wakes.

i decided to do this because she’s going through a regression and battling her naps and I was getting bitten/pulled and sometimes feeding her on and off for an hour to get her to sleep and the overstimulation was real. I am also now finding that she is feeding much better as she’s not ‘snacking’ she’s taking proper feeds.

my issue is for the first few days she would protest the cuddle for a minute, then cuddle in and go to sleep and then transferred. Then after a couple of days i thought it would get better but it’s getting worse? She’s protesting to the point she wont go to sleep. I thought I was making such good progress for it now to have seemed to have done a complete 360

If she is sleeping better could she not be as tired and you need to push back the nap start a little later?

@RandomMess I think she’s in some kind of regression to be honest her naps are either a fight or not at all but she doesn’t sleep past the 30 minute mark either and is having like an hour/hour and a half of sleep across the whole day. So I suppose maybe that’s contributing to the protesting!

Sounds over tired tbh.

She does sound overtired. Will she sleep for longer if you take her out for a walk or drive or if she naps in your bed?

7 months?

Dummy or bottle of warm milk with a teat.

Babies are comforted by sucking and it will really help! Took me until my third breastfed baby to discover how helpful a dummy can be at this age.

@RandomMess @SleafordSods yeah I agree I think she’s in a constant cycle of being overtired!

Car no she wakes at the 30-40min mark. Yesterday I got 2 great contact naps out of her but then tried that again today, got my mum to come over to entertain my toddler and I took her upstairs to contact nap her and she woke at 40 mins crying! I’m assuming it’s some kind of regression! Just feel awful on her because I nude don’t know how to make her naps longer!

@WellErrr shes never taken to a dummy! Which is odd because she’ll take a bottle of expressed milk no problem at all even when I didn’t give her one for a few months but dummy she just wouldn’t! I was just saying to my husband today I think she would really benefit from one

I still breastfeed my toddler to sleep for naps and bedtime....it's the only reason I still BF!

I would tackle the night wakings first. Around that age, if baby woke before 1/2am, I sent DH in as I knew he wasn't hungry. He was angry at first but dad persevered with cuddles and it worked brilliantly, really reduced the night wakes.

I handled 4/5am wakes as only the boob worked at that time.

And contrary to the Internet, which is obsessed with breaking "sleep associations", my toddler sleeps 11 hours a night even though he doesn't fall asleep independently. He just started sleeping around 16 months, when he was ready.

7 months is around the age they go from 3 to 2 naps, so it might be why she's fighting it.