When Can I Night Wean?

This is one of the most common questions I get, and I have 2 answers.

First, the clinical answer: if your babe is 6 months or older, gaining weight as expected, and your Dr gives you the okay to end nighttime feeds, then go ahead.

That doesn’t really answer your question though, does it? You can easily find that information on the internet and if that was all the information you needed, then there you have it! Even though you have this information, though, it doesn’t mean that your baby is going to all of a sudden drop night feeds.

I think what the real question is “if my baby is ready to drop night feeds, why don’t they?”

If you decided to pull night feeds and your baby just kept happily sleeping through the night you probably wouldn’t be reading this. You would also probably wonder what all this “sleep training” fuss is about. My guess is, though, that your babe is still waking in the night to eat if you are reading this.

Okay so why does your baby wake up through the night, even though I’m telling you there’s a good chance they don’t actually need the food?  The answer is very simple: they BELIEVE they need to nurse/bottle feed to get themselves to sleep.

Nursing/bottle feeding to sleep is the most common prop I see as a sleep consultant. Remember, that a sleep prop is anything external that a baby cannot control and that they rely on to fall asleep. Often, people don’t think of nursing/bottle feeding as a prop because babies need to eat! However, they don’t NEED to eat right before every single time they need to sleep.

If you are feeding your baby to sleep throughout the day and at night-time, this is where you’ll need to make changes.

There are also other, more rare cases where parents are putting their babes down awake and the babe is falling asleep on their own, without any props. In these cases, parents are doing everything right at bedtime, but when their babe wakes up throughout the night, they are feeding them back to sleep. These babies are not waking because they need the calories, they are waking out of habit.

In either case, baby believes they need to be fed in the middle of the night in order to go back to sleep. And in both scenarios, you need to break the association between feeding and sleeping.

Okay so now you know the reason WHY they are waking, but WHAT is the strategy?

Stop. Feeding. Them. At. Night.

It won’t be fun for a few days while your babe gets it figured out but think about how nice it will be for them to get 12 consecutive hours of sleep and for you to get 12 consecutive hours to yourself (hopefully at least 8 of those hours will be for sleep).  

If your baby is 6 months or older, a healthy weight, with no medical concerns, there should be no reason why they cannot go through the night without eating. Trust me.

More uninterrupted sleep means your baby’s mind and body get more of those restorative effects that take place during the night, making for a happier, healthier tomorrow!