Although your baby may stop eating regularly at night by the time he’s three months old, don’t expect – or insist – that a baby this young will stop eating all of them, all of a sudden.
But if your baby is three months old, is still nursing or needs a bottle at bedtime, and needs to feed several times during the night, then additional feedings may be causing waking up. If so, you can help him sleep better by reducing the amount of food he eats.
However, if your baby eats a lot – from longer feedings at the breast, or bottles that add more than eight ounces at night – then he has learned that sometimes night is feeding time. Removing these feeds suddenly would not be wise or good.
The amount of milk or water your baby drinks at night may be too much. When they finish four full bottles of eight, that’s a lot of money for even a grown-up to eat through the night.
Problem Solving
If you have noticed that excessive and unnecessary feeding at night is disturbing your child’s sleep, you will be relieved to know that although such feeding can cause serious sleep problems, it is one of the easiest problems to fix.
Two things need to be resolved. The first is to reduce or eliminate feeding at night to avoid its various effects that disturb sleep. The second is to teach your baby new sleep associations so that he can sleep without being held, without feeding, and without sucking from the breast or bottle. You can do this all at onceor one by one.
In order to eliminate the problems caused by feeding, begin to gradually reduce the number of dinners, their size, or both. Do not stop feeding suddenly. A program designed to create new designs will be easy for him to follow.
Your goal is to gradually remove hunger from your child during the day and night. When there is only one night feeding left, you can decide to stop feeding immediately – instead of gradually – if you want, since the amount of food you have eaten at night is now small.
If you’re planning on co-sleeping with hunger at the same time, put your baby to bed after each feeding, even if he wakes up and starts crying. If you breastfeed and sleep next to you, move him to your side while feeding so he can learn to sleep without using your breast as a pacifier. You’ve just fed him, so he’s not hungry – now you’re just changing his expectations of what happens when he sleeps.
In less than a week, if all goes well, you will have finished cutting or eliminating night feeding. After that, continue to use the method of waiting slowly every night (except for mealtimes) until the awakening disappears. It shouldn’t last more than a few days.
