Night Feeding

Most bottle-fed babies will go on needing six feedings in the 24 hours until they are at least six weeks old. Many will need five feedings until they are somewhere around four months. If you are breast-feeding, you may not differentiate between a “feeding” and a “quick suck” so these numbers may seem irrelevant. But as long as your baby has six feedings, you are bound to have to wake up once during your normal sleeping hours. If you are clever though, you need seldom wake twice. And once the baby is content with only five feedings a day you should be able to get a solid stretch of six or seven hours sleep almost every night.

Being woken, night after night, is a tremendous strain, more of a strain than doctors or nurses, friends or relations often realize. It is not the hours of sleep lost which make you so tired. Most of those can probably be made up by going to bed earlier or having an afternoon nap on a weekend. The exhaustion comes from the continual disturbance of your sleep patterns. Being woken, even for a few minutes, two or three times every night for weeks on end can make you feel like sleepwalkers.

Juggling Feeding Times so that you Get More Sleep

Maximum rest for you as well as contentment for the baby depend on your managing to take a flexible approach to his night-time hunger. Keeping him waiting for feedings or trying to enforce a schedule will doom you to unnecessary weeks of broken nights.

The secret of juggling night feedings to suit you all is to stop yourself thinking in disciplinary terms. Don’t let yourself believe that doing without a sixth feeding is “good” of the baby; virtue does not come into it. Nor should you feel that feeding him before his is ravenous, or giving him a few extra sucks by way of a snack, is “spoiling.” It is simply good sense.

If you can genuinely accept this, you will realize that you can usually anticipate and prevent a demand for food which is going to come up at a totally uncivilized hour. You do it by waking the baby up and feeding him instead of waiting for him to wake you. Why fall exhausted into bed at midnight, knowing that the baby will want food at around 2am and around 6am, when you can wake him just before you go to sleep and thus ensure that he will only disturb you at around 4am?

Organizing better nights

This is how one set of parents juggled their baby’s night feedings so that they only had to wake once instead of twice. Once the baby only needed five feedings they fitted neatly around an unbroken 6-hour sleep.

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• The baby was fed around 9:30pm. She then woke between 1 and 2am and again at about 5am. Her remaining feedings came at conventional times: roughly 9:30am, 1:30pm and 5:30pm. Her exhausted parents decided that something must be done. . . .
• They fed her as usual at 9:30pm but did not wait to be woken in the small hours: they woke and fed her just before they settled to sleep at around midnight. After a few nights the baby took to waking them only once – around 4am.
• When it was clear that she needed only five feedings per day they opted for an earlier bedtime. They woke her sooner each night until her midnight and 9:30pm feedings merged into one 10pm feeding. They had almost six hours sleep before she woke around 4am.
• If a late bedtime and no small-hours feeding had suited them better, they could have pushed her 6pm feeding forward toward 7pm; left her until 11pm or midnight, and ten got six hours’ sleep before a comparatively civilized 6am.

Going Through the Night Without Being Fed

Very few real babies abandon their sixth feeding at six weeks, and not all cooperate in having their fifth feeding “juggled” for their parents’ convenience by three or four months. If yours is one of the babies who seems to need more feedings by night than by day and who is still waking you constantly when he “ought” not to be waking you at all, you may well find that your patience and good sense are being eroded by sheer exhaustion. Try to hang on to them. Your baby wakes (usually) because he is hungry. Because he is hungry he cries. A feeding will stop him crying immediately but nothing else will stop him for any useful length of time. So don’t feel under any moral pressure to resist feeding him. Don’t decide that starving him off for half an hour with a drink of sweetened water means that you have won a disciplinary battle. Your baby will sleep through the night when he is ready to do so. In the meantime any method of forcing him to go without a feeding will only make him unhappy and lose you even more sleep.

Leaving the baby to cry

is a common but nonsensical prescription. If he is not hungry, then some other need is being communicated and he should have immediate attention. If he is hungry, food is the right, quick and easy answer.

The longer you leave a hungry baby to cry the more hungry and tired he will get. When you finally give in, the tiredness may mean that he takes only a small feeding before sleep overcomes him; he will wake again all the sooner.

If you refuse to give in and you leave the baby to scream for an hour or more, he may go back to sleep because he is exhausted. But you will still have gained nothing. Half an hour’s nap will revive him and his now ferocious hunger. You will have been kept awake through the first crying bout and now you are awake again. . . .

These miserable fights are totally useless. You cannot teach your baby not to wake up in the night. He cannot wake himself up on purpose any more than you can so he cannot “learn” to stay asleep on purpose either.

Giving drinks that are not food

may put your baby back to sleep for a few minutes if he was only a little bit hungry. But the sweetened water or juice and the sucking only give him a few calories, a temporary feeling of fullness and a warm cuddle. It will not take him more than half an hour to discover that his tummy is still empty; he will wake you again just as you have sunk back into heavy sleep.

If your baby wakes, crying, so soon after a feeding that you cannot believe he is ready for more milk, by all means offer a drink of water. He may simply be thirsty. Under all other circumstances it will be just as quick and infinitely more effective to give him what he is actually asking for: food.

Giving an extra-large feeding in the evening

will not help unless you were actually underfeeding him before.

Babyfood manufacturers sometimes try to cash in on parents’ need for more sleep with advertising copy which says “for a peaceful night for your baby and you, give . . . .” But a baby’s appetite and digestion do not work like an engine; you cannot make him go for longer without a refill by forcing in extra fuel. If he is already taking a full feeding in the evening, it will consist of as much as he wants and, by definition, he will not want any more. If you force extra calories into him, by putting cereals into his bottle, for example, he will still digest it at the normal rate. The extra will affect his figure but it will not affect his sleep.