Does a dream feed work?

[kbaby]

DS is 3 weeks old and feeds around 8pm and then 1am( on a good day) I was wondering if a dream feed would help him to go from 10.30pm to 2.30am. I tried last night but it only resulted in 1/2 hrs extra sleep.

Whats everyones experience?

It will only work if he is on a 4 hour routine, he is very young still I don't think you should try to push him 4hours between feeds, he probably still needs the extra calories at night. We dreamfed our ds and it took about 1.5 weeks before he started stretching his 3 hours to 4 hours at night. The idea of a dreamfeed is to not wake them but still get them to take their milk. It will pay off later as our ds was 6 weeks old when he started stretching his night feeds to 6 hours from the 11pm one, he slept through from about 14 weeks, cutting out the 11pm all together. We were planning on gradually taking away the 11pm feed, but one evening we forgot to set the alarm and we all slept through till morining.

Never worked for ds1. Tried ds2 a couple of times so far, without much success. Agree, he is still very young, and 8 -1 is pretty good. He will stretch this out of his own accord.

remember that with babies these changes to routine does not happen at the first try, perservere and I'm sure you'll get a result.

Dream feed worked great for me. Expressed 140mls off so husband could feed at 11 then baby slept through until 4. Only thing is baby is now refusing most of feed and will only take 60mls at 11 and don't know why. This means he now wakes at 2am and 4am, getting up at 6am. Am exhausted so now don't know if dream feed does work. Anyone else have any ideas?

Very envious of all you lot being able to dreamfeed - no chance of getting my ds (7 wks) to open his mouth and suck when he's asleep!

My greedy little ds just took it as an extra feed waking up at the same time anyway, leaving me exhausted and sore. i wouldn't bother trying til he's a little bit older

I find the dream feed works for me, my dd sleeps till about 5.30/6 but i feed her at 11.30 or else she eats very little. I also find I have to take her out of her cot for her to eat. I make sure the lights are out with no background noise, that way she does't wake up. Tried feeding her in her cot to start with and but she wouldn't eat. Good luck

I have found this really worked for me. DD is now 15 weeks and we started dream feeding at about 9 or 10 weeks. I was expressing into a bottle as find she takes it very easily from a bottle and DH has always done that feed. She was going through until about 4am now until about 6am when she gets up. I stopped expressing for this feed at 12 weeks and now give her a bottle of formula which might be helping with the extra couple of hours. Good luck

yes, dream feeds helped my dd sleep til 7 at 6 weeks!