Sleep training while waking to feed at night

[SomeoneElseEntirelyNow]

What it says on the tin - if my baby is still waking to feed at night (definitely hungry, not just for comfort) is there any point trying to sleep train her at bedtime so she learns to sleep by herself?

Bump (massively impatient and missing the advice of my mummy groups) while doing the first feed of the night

Hello,

We has a sleep plan in place from four weeks and it helped my partner and I as we are very routine driven.

7:00pm bath
7:30pm bottle
8:00pm bed

Every night. And he goes to sleep very easily and we have had our first week of sleeping through the night! He is three months old.

@Ilovethekittehs im not talking about routine, we have that, im talking about sleep training, so i can stop feeding her to sleep and let her learn to drift off by herself. She's not ready to sleep through the night yet, she's had weight issues and still needs the night feeds.

How old is the baby?

Generally sleep training is not recommended / likely to be successful until 6 months, and by six months they often don't necessarily need a night feed.

That said, I don't see why you couldn't give it a go, especially if the baby needs only one night feed, say.

I think you can try to establish healthy habits with the routine you have in place, but in terms of going through the stress of getting them to fall asleep independently when you will be helping them back during the night - no it's not worth it. How old is she? I'm generally in the they will do it when they're ready camp (for me that was 16 months, stopped feeding at night at 9 months).

Shes nearly 6 months, we'd wait til then.

Issue is im wfh and need my evenings back to stay caught up, so i can't spend an hour feeding her to sleep anymore. I need to be able to switch off bedtimes with DH and at the moment she won't sleep without boob.

Have you tried a bottle at all? I know some babies refuse them, but what really broke the feed-to-sleep association (very quickly) for us was a bottle. (Formula in our case, but of course many people express.) I give her a short breastfeed and then a bottle each feed. Might be worth a go if the baby would do it. Or a dummy might be worth a go too.

Good luck, OP. Anything will take 3 days - a week to work, probably, so you need to give it a bit of time (not easy to have the time and energy currently, I know).

She refuses the bottle and dummies... im able to put the time in, i just don't want to put her through controlled crying if feeding her at night wil undo it

DS learnt how to go to sleep on his own at 6 months, but would still wake up for feeds in the night. Learning to go to sleep himself did cut down on 1 night waking and a lot of the horrible unsettledness between 3-6am. So it's definitely worth it!

We night weaned him at 11 months, I would have done it a lot sooner in hindsight!

@sewinginscotland how did he learn?

@SomeoneElseEntirelyNow I did this

I started at 8 weeks though and it took until 6 months to finally take the plunge to do the final step. But very little crying was involved.