Feeding to Sleep

Nine in the evening, the baby has started snoring at the breast or on the last ounce of the bottle, and you start asking yourself, does this count? Is this something that will have to be taken apart later by a consultant charging three hundred dollars for a plan in three months?

What the sleep boards get wrong

The sleep boards run on this. An eight month old who only sleeps on the boob at night. No boob, no nap. Feeding a nine month old to sleep, posted twice in one week by two different people. Twelve months and still on two bottles in the night. The replies split straight down the middle into people who broke the association and people who never did, both groups certain, and none of them describing the same baby as anyone else.

Why babies feed to sleep

Feeding to sleep is what babies are built to do. Milk late in the day is sedating, sucking is regulating, and every mammal doing this outside of a house with a video monitor does it this way. It becomes a problem only if it becomes a problem for the people involved.

The programs that sell a fix rarely say which babies it is for. A four month old fed to sleep and a fourteen month old fed to sleep are not the same situation, and most of what gets sold covers both with one magic trick.

Whether it needs to change

Whether any of it needs to change depends on who it is not working for. A parent who likes the nine o’clock feed and gets to bed afterwards has nothing to solve. A parent doing it eight times a night with work starting again on Monday? Different conversation from whether the habit is a bad one, just not something that works anymore for that household.

What another person in the room changes

On a shift this is the part of the evening that changes less than people expect and more than nothing: another person to lift baby away instead of trying to shimmy out from under goes a long way for being such a small thing.