When did you stop feeding to sleep?

[Beachwaves127]

My Dc is ten months and EBF and no dummy (she was not interested in one). Currently I feed her to sleep. It is quite quick I feed her at 7.45pm and she’s conked in her bed by 8pm. If she wakes in the night I also feed to sleep.

She currently wakes 2-3 times a night.

Just having a bit of a panic as I’m going back to work soon. Sometimes I think this is ok as in reality it’s quite quick and easy to do. Other times I think gosh she’s never going to learn to self soothe.

-Interested in hearing other stories / experiences about when you feed to sleep, did you stop or did baby reject, and how did you go from feeding to sleep to being able to put baby in her crib at 8pm and her drift off by herself.

-i really don’t understand how or when we will make the jump from feeding to sleep to her being able to put herself to sleep?

-is waking 2/3 times normal at this age for an EBF

ps she can self settle at times some times she stirs / wakes a little at end of sleep cycles but will put herself back to sleep.

At 7 months we night weaned which helped massively, she slept 7pm-7am after that. Stopped feeding to sleep very early in, like 8 weeks. By 10 months they are getting most of their nutrients in the day anyway.

Hold on, EBF at 10 months? Have you started weaning (giving solid food) yet?

Sorry I mean milk wise. She has three meals a day and is a good eater :)

if you don’t mind me asking please how did you night wean? Did you just rock to sleep if she woke to start with?

Don’t replace feeding to sleep with rocking to sleep! Especially if you’re going back to work. You need to start encouraging a routine where she self settles or sleep train since she’s never had the chance to learn before? But for your sanity and return to work you can’t be up multiple times a night.

18 months and still feed to sleep. Her Dad can put her down by giving her breastmilk in a cup and rocking.

I never night-weaned and I’m still up 2/3 times a night despite going back to work 6 months ago 🙃 so I’m interested to see the advice you get!

Still feeding 2yo to sleep and in the night. At just before 2 I cut down night feeds because she was feeding more through the night than I could manage with also working full time and we're now at just one or two wakes of 10 mins max which I find manageable. She's started to self-settle but often needs a cuddle to get back to sleep if she wakes as well.

The thing is she can self settle as I’ve seen her do it in the night. But she can’t self settle to go to bed at 8pm, and 2-3 times a night she screams as if the world is ended so she does need me... I think it must be a comfort thing though. So I’m really confused how we get away from the comfort feeding to sleep to her self settling every time at night. There’s so much online to scrambles my head.

We night weaned and sleep trained at 6
months. We moved the feed from the end of the bedtime routine to the beginning. So instead of:
pjs > story > feed > bed (or whatever)
it became:
feed > pjs > story > bed
They key is to keep the bedtime routine short!

As for night weaning we timed the feed and then reduced it (took DS off). So for example:
night 1: 12 minutes
night 2: 6 minutes
night 3: 3 minutes
etc… the idea is to get it to 0 within 7 days. The halving it is what was recommended but I think we repeated some days if he didn’t settle well. Then after that just verbal reassurance.

I can send some info about “sleep training” if you like. It’s tough but short lived.

I fed ds to sleep till just before 2. After that I cuddled him in bed and let him have a sippy cup of milk in the night initially (worried about teeth but he never really wanted it in the end). He still woke in the night - almost every night - till he started school though.

Interested in replies....we did gentle sleep training at 7 months and my nearly 12 month old can self settle for bedtime and naps....however still wakes 1-2 times a night and has a quick feed back to sleep. I have no idea how to get her to sleep through....I thought when she could self settle that would be the magic bullet! I'm going back to work next week to a very demanding job and would love to have a solid night's kip, at least every now and then! If you find a solution please let me know!

We did the same. Night weaned from milk by offering water instead and after a few nights they stopped waking for milk.

Thank you. Yes please any information shared is very much appreciated

My son is 17 months and haven't breastfed him to sleep for a while. He gets water before nap and bed. Only breastfeeds a few times in the day. Can't remember when it stopped. But been like this for a while

He goes down no bother. Sleeps through the night

Thank you @ButterflyBlush and @Lemonpledge my concern is that Dc can go from 0-100 when I offer water (which she will do as she can’t self settle) so if and when she gets to 100 I’ll have no way of getting her back to sleep again. Feel like I’m stuck on a merry go round. I guess I need to look at sleep training probably and once she can self settle then do the water offering instead of milk. Not sure. 🤯

Thanks this sounds positive that Dc could possibly wean herself off….

This is interesting to hear. The problem I think is every child is so different. My Dc honestly gets to 100 in seconds if alone in her cot.

Stopped feeding to sleep every single night aged 2.5 and fully at around age 4 (was only very very occasionally by then) feeding to sleep is a super power, now totally weaned age five, self settles and sleeps through every night. 2nd baby stopped feeding to sleep around 18months and he self settles and sleeps through.

-Interested in hearing other stories / experiences about when you feed to sleep, did you stop or did baby reject?

DS1 it just stopped over time, I used to lie next to him in bed and that became more important than the feeding part so he asked for it less and less until one day I realised he hadn't done it for ages and he must have weaned. This happened probably between the ages of 3-4 years. He was over 4 when he weaned, the bedtime feed was the last to go. From about 2.5 he didn't really feed in the day at all. I stayed sitting on his bed for him to go to sleep until he was nearly 5 Then I discovered by accident that he actually could fall asleep without me there so I worked to strengthen that and it seemed to stick.

DS2 he was somewhere around 2-2.5 and I was pregnant with DS3 and was getting really bad nursing aversion, I basically couldn't bear to feed him for more than a few seconds at a time so I had started cutting him off early and then just rocking to hold him to sleep. However then I had an issue because getting increasingly pregnant I could not lift him into bed So DH ended up taking over the last step of bedtime and I don't know how but he got him to lie in bed and then he would just leave the room and he just....went to sleep??

DS3 I am still feeding to sleep, he is 2. But it doesn't always work and sometimes I can put him in the cot and promise to stay and he will lie there and almost go to sleep. They say that at nursery he lies down and goes to sleep with the other children, and I know that they used to stay with him at first when he first started sleeping in the sleeping room, so I thought we would try this.

-i really don’t understand how or when we will make the jump from feeding to sleep to her being able to put herself to sleep?

I never really got this either, the only thing I got is that you can either wait until they are in a bed and lie down next to them or wait until they understand language well enough to follow instructions, then you can work on lying down in stages.

-is waking 2/3 times normal at this age for an EBF

Yes IME :)

We stopped feeding to sleep and night weaned at about 10-11 months. Hats off to you because I was on my knees with 3-4 wake ups a night and I was also going back to night shifts.

DH had some holiday before then so put DS down for all of his naps for about a week. We viewed that as ‘practice’ - a missed or a short nap isn’t fun but it’s not as traumatic as bedtime. There was a bit of crying but DH always stayed and comforted him, We then bit the bullet and tackled nights. We loosely followed the Jay Gordon method which you can google. Any wake up, DH went in to comfort him/get him back to sleep by hook or by crook. It was done in about a week and DS went from waking multiple times per night to sleeping through. He hardly cried at all over night. I’m not sure if the naps prepared him or what, but it was very untraumatic.

I'm settling a 1 year old baby into childminding at the moment ebf and co sleeping at home 90 minutes and still not sleeping I did suggest expressing milk but mum hasn't tried that in 30 years this has been the hardest baby to settle

When DD was 3 years and 4 months.
she slept through from then on! 🙈

We only night weaned about a month before fully weaning - at about 2.5y.

If you're going back to work, then I'd do whatever is easiest at bedtime. Provided you can make it back from work for bedtime, feeding to sleep is so so much easier than any alternative. You can relax and read your phone etc while you feed to sleep - you'll be exhausted from work too.

Do not rush into the endless Mr Men books stage...! Nothing worse than an exhausting day at work followed by a toddler who needs to be entertained in a gradually more soporific way at bedtime.

With DS1 I bought into all the stuff that said sleep training/pushing them outside their comfort zone is cruel, but now I think it is possible to make gentle changes, the key for me is it just being a small step at a time. So when I was struggling with feeding DS2 I found that I could stop him from feeding when he was almost asleep, and he would wake up and protest a bit but because he was really sleepy, if I jiggled and rocked and patted then he would generally be soothed enough to just drop back off to sleep. If he wasn't being, then I would let him feed again before he got too worked up and I was back to square one.

Some of the sleep training literature is very keen on the idea that you must never go back to your previous method otherwise the transition to the new method won't work, I found that is not true, but it does slow things down. I was OK with it being a bit slower because I felt this was at DC's pace. But anyway the idea that this undoes all your progress is false IME. You can still make progress.