Baby only feeds immediately before sleeping

[Nellephant]

...or while pretty much asleep.

She's 6 months. She's always been a bit like this but it's come to the fore as we're trying to sleep train (please don't judge, she's never left alone to cry) and the program we are following is really hot on separating feeding from sleeping.. but we just can't!

She's mix fed (breast overnight and a mix of breast/expressed/formula in the day. This morning I bfd at 4.30ish (she didn't take much, boobs still felt pretty full) then at 7am she'd only take 25ml plus about a minute on each breast. After her morning nap she's only take 50ml, then another 50ml an hour later. I tried to feed her immediately before her lunchtime nap and she wouldn't take anything, then I put her in her sleeping bag and turned off the light and she downed 170ml. Woke up an hour later and drank another 100ml while falling back to sleep. Gah!

Her weight is fine at the moment but her sleep is horrendous so we really need to do something about this.

I have considered silent reflux - she has always coughed a lot and gags on the bottle/boob often. The health visitor (on the phone not face to face) thought not reflux as if it was she'd be growing out of it by now. DP is very keen not to medicalise her, given that her weight is fine and she's generally a pretty cheery baby, but maybe I should insist on a trip to the doctor? Or maybe it's "just" behavioural?

Any thoughts?

My nearly 6 month old has started doing exactly the same thing!! Boobs will be very full and she'll only feed when sleepy right before a nap. I'm not too worried as her weight is good and and she feeds a lot when sleepy.

No solutions I'm afraid but it's nice to know it's not just us.

@ASomers how does your baby sleep? I wouldn't mind all the sleep feeding if DD didn't wake 5+ times a night..

@nellephant she used to sleep really well but has been waking so much for the last couple of weeks. She wakes every hour most of the time, with maybe one longer stretch at some point (2 or 3 hours). I'm hoping it's a short phase...

@ASomers sounds familiar! 🤞🤞It gets better for both of us

What sleep training are you doing? At 6m we tried to break the feeding to sleep habit with DD and did the whole gentle gentle thing with absolutely zero success. CC worked for us in 3 days. Sleeping by herself for naps and bedtime, and feeding when she woke. I think all the gradual gentle half-half stuff was really confusing for her, she didn't know what was going on, and all the changes were too slight for her to get the message. A clean break, no middleground, and she got it really easily.

Are you sure she’s not teething, might be the reasons she’s not feeding well as could be hurting her.

@Ohalrightthen - its basically doing a short night/nap routine, then putting them down and only comforting by talking/patting etc for 6 minutes, after 6 minutes you can cuddle them/feed them till they calm down, then put them down again for 8 minutes (continuing to talk/pat etc). Unfortunately our bedtime routine has to involve feeding, otherwise she'd never eat, and it's really difficult to stop her feeding to sleep while at the same time ensuring she's getting enough calories.

@Matilda1981 I have looked and don't think so...

Sometimes you can’t see any signs of teeth but they’re moving around in the gums causing discomfort - wouldn’t completely rule it out!

My 2.5yo still feeds to sleep. I don't blame you for wanting to stop the night feeds, but I would suggest you might be onto a losing battle!

I have only just managed to get him sleeping through so no idea if this would work for a 6mo, but what I've done is first gave myself a deadline for when I would bring him into our bed - only after 3am - I stayed in his room and spent as long as it took to get him back down any wake up before then. Then I did a bit of a delay tactic so when he woke up I spent 5 mins trying other comfort before feeding him. On the second night it was supposed to go to 10 mins, then 15 and so on. In practice we moved his bedroom so I never got to those steps as he was unsettled and he just started staying asleep most of the night and then all night.

At no point did this involve separating feeding and sleeping, because this just didn't work for us ever. And of course him sleeping might have been not related to anything we did :o

My first child I had some success separating falling asleep from milk at about 9 months by using the pantley pull off method from the no cry sleep solution, but he did continue to wake up and want to feed (just not to sleep) until he was about 2 as well.

Cosleeping saved my sanity with both of them.