Why does my 13 month old continue to wake up at the night for a bottle?

Dana Obleman: Hi, I’m Dana. Welcome to this week’s video chat. Today our question is from Sharon, and she is wondering why her 13 month old continues to wake up in the middle of the night for a bottle, no matter how much she feeds him during the day.

First of all, Sharon, this has nothing to do with food. Nothing. It’s not a matter of needing calories, not eating well. Just scratch that right off your list. It’s not food related.

Let me explain a little bit about why that is. When babies put themselves to sleep with a prop, every bedtime, I’m assuming your toddler gets a bottle, and she falls asleep to the bottle, with the bottle, and then you transfer her to the crib. That’s the problem.

It’s not the food, it’s the bottle. What happens then is that becomes a sleep prop, and your child now thinks, “When I have a wake up in the night, the fastest and easiest way to get back to sleep is for you to come in and give me a bottle, and off I go.”

The only way to break this pattern is to stop allowing her to fall asleep with bottle in the first place. It always starts with bedtime. Any sleep challenge, I’m going to ask you to start at bedtime, and I’m going to look at your bedtime routine, and I want to see some steps there.

Let’s just for example say she has a bath, she gets her pajamas on. You can offer some milk. I would way rather it be in a sippy cup at this age. There’s really no need to continue to bottle feed a 13 month old. Change to a sippy cup, that’s going to help a lot, right there.

Give a little bit of milk in a sippy cup while you read a couple of stories, and then into the crib she will go. OK? I know what’s you’re thinking, you’re thinking, “What, she’s going to cry. She’s going to protest.”

Of course she is. That makes sense to me. If she’s used to falling asleep with a bottle in her mouth, and tonight she isn’t, there’s some change there, and she’s going to have to learn how to get to sleep without it. The good news is she will, and she should.

It’s important. She can do this, it’s just going to take a few nights of repetitive practice before she starts to figure out, “OK, I don’t actually need anything in my mouth. I don’t need any kind of liquid going down my throat. I can absolutely fall asleep completely independently.”

The good news is that that’s going to end the middle of the night wake up, as well, because when she has a brief awakening in the night, she’ll know that, “I have control. I know how to do this. I don’t need any help or assistance from any outside thing. I can do it all on my own.”

She’ll go right back to sleep, and so you’ve really solved two problems here. One, you’ve got her off the bottle, and two, she’s sleeping through the night.

If you have any food concerns, because sometimes people, if the child doesn’t eat great during the day, they feel like, “Well, I should really give her a bottle in the night, because she didn’t eat well throughout the day,” that’s a bit of a vicious cycle. It’s kind of a catch 22.

Doesn’t eat well during the day, makes up calories in the night. By ending any kind of nighttime calorie intake, you will see an increase in daytime consumption, and that’s just biological, that is just the body’s need to have a certain amount of calories every day to grow, and function, and do well.

That just will override anything that has to do with her, and she’ll just start eating better, and eating more. I often find that by minimizing or eliminating liquid intake, in particular, almost instantly increases solid consumption, food consumption, which really needs to change at the 12 month mark, anyway.

Now that food becomes a primary source, then liquids take the back burner. Yay! We solved all kinds of problems here today. Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well!

Transcription by CastingWords