Feeding throughout the night to sleep - does it subside?

[lm4868]

My EBF 16wk old son is, I believe, experiencing the 4 month sleep regression at the moment. He is waking every 2hrs at night and the only thing that soothes him is breastfeeding back to sleep. I have to wait until he is absolutely fast asleep before I can attempt to put him back in his cot next to us so that he doesn’t wake up, but often fail at this and he kicks off and I end up just having him sleep in the bed with us. I don’t mind the feeding to sleep per se at this stage if I had some reassurance from some other mums that the wake ups to feed do become less as they get older? And when?!

My other question is, will he just outgrow needing to be fed to sleep? I have tried the whole putting him down drowsy as per the Little Ones programme, tried shhhhing him/side settling but he clocks on pretty quickly and will only be rocked to sleep over my shoulder or fed to sleep.

Would really appreciate any reassurance from people further down the road than us that this will naturally improve over time? Feeling a bit lost and panicking that I will be waking 7 times a night for the next 12 months! Thanks in advance.

It will naturally improve over time, and then go backwards every so often as well, sleep is a bit of a rollercoaster for the first 12 months!

DD is nine months old now and while she hasn’t been as tricky as some of the babies I’ve read about on here, I’ve had my fair share of her waking up every 1-2 hours and BF back to sleep each time.

At 4-5 months we did controlled
comforting with her which worked really well, I wrote about the instructions our sleep consultant gave us on a post that should come up if you search under my name?

Will your son take a bottle? If so then it would be good if your partner could help with some of the night wakings so you could get more sleep. When I went back to work after Christmas DP started doing the 1am(ish) feed and that made me feel much better.

And it does overall get better, after a false start last night DD only woke up once for a feed, I am enjoying this good phase while it lasts!

I don't breastfeed and never have but my 5 month old has not had a bottle during the night since 10 weeks old. She feeds at 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 7.30pm and sleeps through most nights.

@20viona thats really helpful isn’t it 🙄

@TashieWoo I'm trying to say that babies grow out of being fed through the night as OP asked.

Hi @TashieWoo thanks for your reply. I did find your post on sleep consultant advice and tried the controlled comforting via ssshhh and “sleepy time now” with hand on chest for the last 2 nights and it took 18mins and 14mins to get him down respectively. The best thing was the fact that he only woke up twice last night and 3 times the night before!

I wanted to ask you about how you tackled daytime naps? I note that your consultant said not to tackle those initially? I did the controlled comforting for this morning’s nap which worked after 10mins but he still can’t seem to link sleep cycles so lunch nap is always short. Did your daughter just learn to link them or did you need to do the comforting midway through the naps?

Also how are you finding it now that she’s a bit older?

thanks for your advice

We're having awful sleep problems at the moment and the controlled comforting sounds interesting but I can't find the post where it's detailed! Are you able to describe/link at all?

www.mumsnet.com/talk/sleep/4662643-talk-to-me-about-self-soothing-self-settling

Amazing thank you!

Well done @forreallife that’s brilliant! How have the following nights been? Your DS was clearly ready for the change.

I think we started doing it for daytime naps about 4 weeks later, and it was fine, she still does one-cycle daytime naps most of the time now though (10 months old today), the last couple of months she’s done the odd 1hr+ nap in the cot so they might be lengthening gradually but the consultant told me this wasn’t a problem, she’s still on 3 naps a day as a result though. I’m just going with it, if I’ve tried to settle her between cycles or go in before a cycle finishes that’s never worked, it may do for your baby though.

I won’t lie, sleep since she turned 7 months has been up and down, but this is to do with teething, illness, separation anxiety (I’m back at work now) and the 8 month regression, which is linked to all the development they’re going through. So lots of changes in her little life, she struggled to get to sleep so I went back to feeding her to sleep as I think she just needed the comfort.

But then about 4 weeks ago she decided she didn’t want to feed to sleep anymore, got a bit cross and practically asked me to put her into her cot, and she’s started putting herself to sleep at night again (she was always able to do this for naps). So if your baby is finding it difficult for whatever reason, there is no harm in going ‘backwards’ as they don’t un-learn how to fall asleep. She’s also doing longer stretches now, I was up every 1-2 hours for a good few weeks but now she’s doing 5-6 hour stretches fairly regularly which is lovely!

good luck ☺️

Sorry I linked to the wrong person, that message was meant for @lm4868 . I hope I’ve also helped you too though @forreallife !