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Parenting

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Did stopping breastfeeding improve your toddler’s sleep?

29 replies

Moonshine160 · 15/02/2024 19:32

DS is 17 months old and his sleep has always been horrendous. He gets enough sleep, it’s just very broken because he is so wakeful. He wakes numerous times a night, sometimes he will find his dummy and go back to sleep but most of the time I have to breastfeed him. He doesn’t fall asleep being fed, he goes back to sleep when I’ve put him back down but he doesn’t settle unless hes had that feed. Then within an hour he can be awake again. We’ve had the odd few weeks where he’s only woken up once but it always goes back to this. He used to fall asleep independently for both naps and bedtime, but for the last month he now refuses his cot at bedtime and will only fall to sleep on my bed and is on and off my boob for ages before finally falling to sleep. He sleeps fine in his cot for naps but during the night he’s now in our bed all night. He’s hysterical if I try and put him in his cot. He also keeps asking for more milk during the day now, despite a month ago he had cut out his day feeds entirely. I feel mentally and physically drained and I want to stop breastfeeding. But I feel like it’s a bad time to stop now that he’s upped his feeds even more! He’s also got his back molars coming through. But I really feel like I can’t go on with such broken night sleep. There’s no sign of it getting better. He slept better at 3 months than this. Did stopping breastfeeding your older baby/toddler improve night sleep? I’m worried that it won’t and I’ll just lose the only tool I have to get him back down again

OP posts:
tulipsunday · 16/02/2024 15:33

Yep started sleeping through immediately after night weaning. Kept up two feeds in the day. Still wakes occasionally now aged three but weaning definitely helped when younger

FrizzledFrazzle · 16/02/2024 22:43

We're trying this now with my 20mo.

Mixed success.

On the downside:

  • Still waking at night. He slept through the 2nd and 3rd night and we were celebrating, but since then the novelty has worn off and he's teething, so we've had a few nights of 2 or 3 wakes

On the plus side:

  • fewer wakes, mostly later into the night
  • not taking more time to get to sleep again than if he got a feed. In fact probably quicker
  • DH is doing the night wakes. This is an enormous win. We will probably move to alternating nights soon, but want to establish the new normal of no milk first.
  • DS seems to need really little sleep. Awake before 6am, asleep at 9pm with a 2 hour nap at nursery or 1 hour at home. I think we're going to need to start cutting that down a bit to get better overnight sleep tbh.
gherent · 17/02/2024 00:26

I fed my eldest to sleep until 3.5 yrs and she slept through from 18m, we never coslept although she was in our room until age 4.

Currently feed dc2 to sleep and she has slept through since age 18m, she's 21m now. We did cosleep for a while and she would feed through the night, but we managed to stop that while still breastfeeding to sleep. She is still in a cot in our room. So there was no link between breastfeeding and sleeping through for mine, or putting in a separate room.

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shams05 · 17/02/2024 00:51

Yes stopping definitely improved for mine too. My youngest slept through the very first night after she understood there was no more milk from mummy. That was one week short of her 2nd birthday.
The irony was that I had gotten so used to night feeds I started getting headaches from sleeping too much! I was only actually sleeping 6-7 hours but it was uninterrupted sleep which after two years my body felt was too much.

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