When did you stop giving bottles overnight?

[Ais234]

My DD is almost 8 months old, formula fed and growing well on 50th centile. She has 4 feeds of 5-6oz during the day including one at bedtime. She's still waking up once overnight approx 2am to have another 7oz bottle. She does seem hungry for this and goes back to sleep pretty quickly afterwards, but often doesn't seem very hungry when she wakes up in the morning.

From what I've read FF babies can in theory drop all feeds overnight from approx 6 months so I'm wondering is this just a habit now and can I do anything to drop this feed? Or will she just drop it when she's ready?

I realise I'm extremely lucky that she sleeps as well as she does and not keen to rock the boat or do anything to cause lots of crying! Just wondered what age your formula fed babies have dropped night feeds and did they do this of their own accord or did you actively wean them off it?

I offer her 2 or 3 solid meals a day, mix of mashed up stuff and finger foods but very hit and miss how much she actually eats.

We 100% followed their lead.

DD1 - about 7 months. She was drinking maybe an ounce or two in the night & didn’t seem that interested. She had mostly just woken & wanted to go back to sleep but couldn’t settle. So we stopped & it made no difference to her sleep! DD1 was a terrible sleeper, hunger wasn’t the issue!

DD2 9/10 months. She is a good sleeper & would wake, feed & immediately back to sleep. Drank a full bottle overnight. By 9/10 months that was quickly reducing to a couple ounces & she wolfed down all food by that age. She started to sleep through some nights as well. So we trialled stopping and just offering her dummy back and she started sleeping through after a couple days!

7 months

BF’ed my kids so a little bit different, but we stopped night feeds at 7 months (DC1&2) and 5 months (DC3). If they’re drinking and eating well throughout the day, our GP said that after 4-5 months there’s really no need to carry on with night feeds.

DD was sleeping through maybe 4/5 nights out of 7 from 7months. Then at 8 months she started waking for a feed every night, never sleeping through. I went with it and kept the feed but soon realised it was then just a habit, especially because she was waking almost the same time each night and she was getting plenty of milk in the day feeds. I started reducing the amount of milk oz to see and even when offered just 2oz, she always went back to sleep instantly. So I figured it wasn’t really hunger. Tried weaning off by coming right down to 1oz with the hope she would no longer bother waking for it but that didn’t work. So had to drop it completely. Went in to comfort her every few mins and encourage her back to sleep. There was crying but after 3 nights she stopped waking for it and that was it- slept through ever since.

Thanks for the replies. Seems like she could be ready to drop the night feed soon then. I might start gradually reducing down by an oz and see what happens.