How am I supposed to stop feeding to sleep and is it going to be a problem?

[EleanorofCastile]

I was quite happy with DDs sleep until I realised that I am doing this and it's supposed to cause problems in the longer term...

She is 12 weeks tomorrow, but a good weight and has always fed very well. Exclusively breastfed and we have been unsuccessful in attempts to feed with a bottle of expressed milk. From 9-11 weeks she was only waking once for a feed, but since the weekend she has been waking 4-6 times per night which I initially put down to a growth spurt. However, I'm now concerned that I might be feeding to sleep and that she is waking each time and needing to be fed back to sleep. I am also wondering if it's possible that she is going through the 4 month sleep regression a bit early and so waking and needing to feed back to sleep again rather than waking because she is hungry?

She has a "witching hour" most evenings just before bed, so I tend to spend an hour or so dealing with the crying and fussiness ( this is spent rocking, walking, feeding on and off, singing gentle songs and playing white noise in our bedroom) until she is calm enough to have her final feed when she falls asleep and i transfer her from my position sitting/lying on our bed to her co-sleeper. I am not sure how I would NOT feed to sleep without putting her down and inevitably crying and/or not having had her final feed! I am not sure why some days we do not get the witching hour, I have been unable to isolate what may have been different, and they are getting less severe as she gets older.

I would really LOVE to hear other peoples experiences and advice on this! She tends to have most (and possibly all recent) naps in the day in the pram as we are out and about and walk a lot. I am only worried about this due to the increased wakings for the last 5 days or so and that fact that all the sleeping experts recommend against feeding to sleep by this age.

Thanks for all the advice! I'm am going to carry on feeding to sleep when it works for us but since posting, DD has had a couple of evenings where she finished feeding and hasn't fallen asleep on the boob so I've put her down awake... and she has gone to sleep eventually either with me or DH just lying next to her and shushing, and once I've had to resort to white noise. Some nights, like tonight, she is happy to just feed to sleep and I'm happy to let her.

We've started to do a bath each evening too. It feels like it would be madness to do anything other than give her a quick feed each time she wakes up during the night as 10-20 minutes later she can be back in her sidecar and I haven't really woken up myself. One thing I have tried to do is increase her day time naps as she had been staying awake for too long, and I think this has had a positive impact on her sleep overnight and almost banished the witching hour. This is easier said than done and in fact I've found this quite stressful, but enormously satisfying when it works. I think she has been going through a growth spurt which caused the more frequent wake ups as she seems to have grown and changed loads in the last couple of days.

I always fed dd to sleep. When she was 2 I stopped breastfeeding and she dropped her daytime naps then. DS had a dummy, he was still rubbish at daytime naps but is a slightly better sleeper at night. I think that they're even born good sleepers or not. I wouldn't sweat it, do whatever feels right.

Hi ladies, I run a BF support group and if you want some real life mums to talk to about all things boob (and anything else) I'd definitely recommend finding a local group near you.

Some things to think about:

• babies boost your milk supply in the evening by cluster feeding. A seemingly frustrating part of boobing until babies get a bit older.

• NHS recommends breastfeeding exclusively until 6 months when you introduce solids. The world health organisation recommends babies continue breastfeeding alongside solids for 2 years to help support their developing immune system. Follow on milk formula is not necessary, a bit of a con to get you to buy formula. Babies can have ordinary cows milk from 1 if you want to give up boobing and avoid expensive formula milk.

• feeding to sleep will not harm your babies. Breast fed babies feed differently to bottle fed babies as milk is not in contact with teeth. Therefore you don't need to wake a sleeping baby to brush their teeth before bed, you should really do this for a bottle feeder. And bottle fed babies are often fed to sleep.

• whether your baby wakes once or five times in the night is not really down to whether they are FF or BF. Perhaps in the very early days when their tummies are tiny.

• unfortunately not all babies will take a dummy, it's pot luck. I wouldn't advise trying one until a baby is 6 weeks as can possibly cause nipple confusion. But if baby can take one after they can be a sanity saver.

• a lot of people from your MIL to the checkout lady will want to know if your baby is 'good' and sleeping through alone. Just smile and nod. 2 of my children slept through and 1 didn't. Now he is 3 and very much in need of cuddles and emotionally wears his heart on his sleeve. He hasn't had boob since just before he turned 1, and now I realise he is just like that. And that's the point, everyone is unique and we shouldn't judge babies/mums for not fitting into a certain expectation.