How do you sleep train but keep a night feed?

[Anonymous]

I get that you put the baby to bed awake and let them cry, but if they wake up hungry in the night how do you handle it? Feed them and put them down awake again?

[Anonymous]

Yes. Take care of their immediate need and put them back down. Night training really is just about teaching them to fall asleep without help. They’re going to wake up in the middle of the night for one reason or another for the rest of their lives, they just need to be able to get themselves back to sleep.

[Anonymous]

How old is your baby? I would think you'd sleep train after your baby naturally drops all night feeds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I get that you put the baby to bed awake and let them cry, but if they wake up hungry in the night how do you handle it? Feed them and put them down awake again?

Yes and when you feed keep it as quiet and dark as possible so you don’t stimulate baby. No lights, talking, loud noises etc… just feed, burp and sleep.

[Anonymous]

It entirely depends on the age on your baby. When we sleep trained our kids at 6 months, our ped said that if they woke up at least 5 hours after their last feeding, we should feed them before putting them back to sleep.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How old is your baby? I would think you'd sleep train after your baby naturally drops all night feeds.

Some babies need night feeds longer than others. If your baby isn’t sleeping well, you often have no way of knowing whether they need to eat or not at any given wake up. If you’re waiting to sleep train until they’re not waking up during the night anymore, that’s not going to work very well.

[Anonymous]

You wake them.

I woke all my kids for a dreamfeed around 10:30/11pm for months after sleep training.

Theoretically, you could also do this at like 2 or 3am, but all the reputable sources say not to sleep train until 4 months. At 4 months, a baby can go from 11pm to 7am without food.

If you want to wean night feeds slowly so they don’t wake up hungry out of habit, use the Sleep Easy Solution. That’s what I did. Highly recommend.

[Anonymous]

It depends on their age/growth and whether based on that your pediatrician says they still need a night feed. If not, then you just don’t get them even if they wake up. They might be hungry because they’ve gotten used to it, but that doesn’t mean they need it. If they do need it, then you only get them if it’s been long enough that it actually makes sense to feed them again (ie not 30 mins after bed time) and then let them put themselves back to sleep.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You wake them.

I woke all my kids for a dreamfeed around 10:30/11pm for months after sleep training.

Theoretically, you could also do this at like 2 or 3am, but all the reputable sources say not to sleep train until 4 months. At 4 months, a baby can go from 11pm to 7am without food.

If you want to wean night feeds slowly so they don’t wake up hungry out of habit, use the Sleep Easy Solution. That’s what I did. Highly recommend.

That's really interesting.

I had a kid who needed to be woken for meds in the night when he was small. Since I was waking him, I went ahead and fed him before I put him back down.

He slept "through" (in the sense that he didn't wake me up, he was getting woken) almost from the beginning.

[Anonymous]

To be honest, I just based it on what I thought my kid needed. I did sleep training after 4 months. Depending on how much I fed my kid before bed, I knew that when I first put them down, the soonest they'd need another feed would be 2-3 hours. So, if they cried before 2 hours, I'd wait, but if they cried beyond that, I went in, checked diaper/fed them and then rocked them for a second, then they went right back down. My youngest held onto her night feeding a lot longer than my son, but she herself eventually dropped it on her own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You wake them.

I woke all my kids for a dreamfeed around 10:30/11pm for months after sleep training.

Theoretically, you could also do this at like 2 or 3am, but all the reputable sources say not to sleep train until 4 months. At 4 months, a baby can go from 11pm to 7am without food.

If you want to wean night feeds slowly so they don’t wake up hungry out of habit, use the Sleep Easy Solution. That’s what I did. Highly recommend.

We did this too starting at around 4 months. Went down at 7, woke him for a dream feed at about 10. He usually stayed half asleep for the bottle and then fell right back asleep afterward. Then he slept until 6 or 7 am. I think we dropped the dream feed at about 9 or 10 months? We just made the bottles smaller over time until eventually we didn’t give him anything.