Dad doing night feeds

[Lululibby86]

My dd is 6 months old and has only had breastmilk. Mostly directly but on a few occasions my dh has given her expressed milk successfully in the day.
We want to introduce a bottle of formula for her bedtime feed, given to her by dh. So he can put her to bed and do feeds in the night, which has been only done by me so far by breastfeeding.
We tried this for first time tonight and was a disaster. She took the formula fine and then rather than falling asleep she screamed and worked herself up into a massive cry (she barely ever cries) Eventually he gave up and called me upstairs and as soon as she saw me she smiled.
DH quite upset, I've said we just need to persevere but is easy for me to say as I never really have to deal with her crying.
Any advice on handing over night feeds to daddy with no boobs?

The way we tackled this with DD (had exactly the same) was tedious but for about 3 weeks I gave her a bottle instead of bfeeding her, then sang twinkle twinkle to her until she went to sleep. Then DH did the same and she was fine then as she had got used to the new routine. I went back to bfeeding when I put her to sleep after about another 3 weeks and she was fine with either. With DS DH did some bottlefeeds from the start to avoid this!
The advice I got was to go out for a few evenings and leave him with it, they will sort it out between them eventually. But if you dont want to do that the way we did it did work with minimum crying.
Good luck and keep going - it is worth it to feel a bit more freedom in the evenings again!

As PP said, the breastfeeding isn’t just for food it’s comfort, so you need to build in other associations for comfort that daddy can do. Look up habit stacking, that helped for us.

Honestly she’s 6 months, is it worth it? She’ll be dropping night feeds soon enough, and in a few months she’ll be reducing feeds further.

If you do want to persevere start off with expressed milk if she takes that. Once’s she’s settled with that sub in 1 oz of formula in a bottle of ebm. Then 2oz after a few nights, then 3, until she’s taking formula. Formula can be quite unsettling to a bf babies stomach so this will help, as well as getting them weaned away from the breast.

I did this- once dd got the hang of that one bottle of formula she point blank refused to breastfeed completely and we had to switch to ff full time. Which was a pita and why I never bothered with my second.