Breast fed or bottle fed , which makes baby sleep?

[homegrownmumma]

I have a near one year old that still
Wakes 3 times a night , he has never been a good sleeper , up Until 9 months old he was waking every 2 hours if not every hour .
He was combination fed for the first 6 weeks then we moved to formula .
My sister has had 2 babies that have only been on formula and both have been great sleepers from an early age .

I would love to know if people had a good sleeper or bad sleeper and how they were fed and just see if there's many similar results , I'm pretty sure babies are all different and it makes no difference to how they were fed but I'm very interested just to see 😊

Three babies all formula fed. First slept through from 6 weeks old, absolute dream baby. Second didn’t sleep through until he was 3. Third was sleeping through reliably from about one.

My baby's sleep was absolutely transformed when we switched to formula at night at six months - he went within a few days from waking up every one to two hours to waking up once a night. This is the first time I've admitted this to anyone, in real life or online, because it seems to be quite taboo: there is a real insistence in pro-BF circles that there is no difference between BF and FF babies in terms of how they sleep, despite the fact that actual scientific studies have shown this isn't true. Obviously it isn't true for every baby and it may have been total coincidence for us (one hell of a coincidence if so, though) but I feel a bit torn about it: I have no desire to put women off breastfeeding, but I did feel a bit resentful when exclusively breastfeeding that it feels like it's understated just how much more of a toll breastfeeding takes in various ways, including sleep, and therefore how much more support, on average, breastfeeding mothers need.

In my very small sample group, all the good sleepers have been FF and the wakers have been BF.

Is that not basically because formula induces a milk coma, and because it’s slower to digest that effect lasts longer, resulting in longer sleep stretches?

I’m sure you’ll get plenty of posters coming on to say their BF baby was a great sleeper from early on, but that does seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

I ebf until 6 months and she was always a good sleeper, only ever woke up once per night, but mostly slept through (except when she had a cold). I think it just depends on the baby!

My EBF baby is a terrible sleeper, but out of my group of friends the only two babies who sleep through the night (and have done since about 3 months) are both breastfed. I think that sleep is developmental and there are far more factors at play than how they are fed.

I know I couldn't cope with my baby waking up every two hours without being able to reliably feed him back to sleep.

FF babies sleep better on average.

expectingscience.com/2014/09/09/lets-face-it-formula-fed-babies-sleep-better-from-their-parents-perspective/

It's probably less to do with the formula per se, and more to do with the fact that FF parents respond slightly differently to their babies. You know how much formula they have drunk already because bottles are see-through and have numbers down the side, so it is much easier to feel confident that "this baby has already had enough to eat," and it is a pain to get hold of bottles of formula in the middle of the night and there is a risk of overfeeding with formula so you can't just keep handling out the bottles. So FF parents tend to settle babies in other ways more often, and the babies are less likely to develop a strong suck-to-sleep association.

The above probably also explains why breastfed babies appears to be less likely to become really bad sleepers if parents introduce solids at 4mo than at 6mo (because as the baby is established on a bit of food and the parents can see the baby eating with their own eyes, it probably makes parents a bit more confident/firm about settling without the boob at night, making it less likely that the baby is going to start getting into a "thing" where they cannot fall asleep without a breast in their mouth).

expectingscience.com/2018/07/11/introducing-solids-and-baby-sleep-yep-early-solids-improve-baby-sleep-after-all/

FWIW I BF but started solids at 4mo (not because of sleep stuff, but for completely different reasons). My babies are "OK" sleepers--not brilliant, not terrible.

With my 3 (all ebf) my first slept through at about 1, my middle slept 11-7 from
Birth until around 4 months when he decided he no longer needed sleep, he then slept through again at around 8 months. With my baby now, who's almost 6 months he has never slept through 😔. I'm planning on giving a bottle of formula at bedtime in the hope I might get more sleep! He's up on average 6 times at the moment. I'm keeping my fingers crossed it works because I'm knackered!

So very mixed then really , interesting how mums with multiple children all fed the same but all sleep differently

DS hungry sma. Slept for hours 😊💕

My DD is FF and dropped her 1am feed at about 6 weeks, approaching 13 weeks now and sleeping from 7-8pm to 4-5am quite reliably