Hi! I’m Dana Obleman, creator of The Sleep Sense Program. If you’d rather read than watch, I’ve transcribed the text of this video below.

This week’s question is from Stacy. She writes:

“My five-month-old goes to sleep around 8:00 p.m. I wake him around 10:00 p.m. to give him another feeding, to try to get him to sleep through the night. He wakes up wanting another bottle around 2:00 a.m. and then will sleep until 6:00 a.m. Should I continue with the 10:00 p.m. feed or let him sleep?”

That is a good question! There is a lot of talk about something called a dream feed, which is to feed your child while they sleep, right before you go to bed in the hopes that it buys you some extra time. In my experience, it really does not buy very much extra time. Occasionally, I will hear a success story from someone who dream feeds at 11:00 p.m. and the baby sleeps through until morning but more often than not, I hear exactly what you said. You give him a feed at 10:00 p.m. but he is still up at 2:00 a.m. At five-months-old, unless he is underweight, there really should be no reason that he needs to eat that much in the night, if at all.

There are a lot of five-month-olds who sleep straight through the night and I just find that dream feeding does not buy any extra time. As babies get older, their bodies learn to consolidate nighttime sleep. By four or five months, their body is very similar to that of an adult in that they go to bed and sleep through the night. I worry that dream feeding interferes with the consolidation of nighttime sleep and if you are dream feeding, you are running the risk of perpetuating a feed-to-sleep association.

No baby can actually eat in the deepest part of their sleep cycle. When you go in and take him out of the crib to nurse him (or even if you keep him in the crib and just stick a bottle in), he has got to come up to the surface. He might have been in his deepest rest but now he has to come up to his lighter sleep so that he can actually eat. When you stop, my worry is that he is still going to wake at 10:00 p.m. expecting a feed. For those reasons, I never suggest a dream feed and so I do think that it is wise to stop that 10 p.m. feed. I think it is better to just let sleep naturally consolidate; naturally follow its own structure.

Prepare yourself for the fact that he may wake anyway at 10:00 p.m. feeling like he needs a feed and, so I would just push through that. I am guessing from what you have written, that he falls asleep on his own at bedtime and so because he has that skill, it should transfer fairly quickly to the rest of the night. It might mean though that you go through a couple of nights where he cries for a bit and you can stay, or leave and check until he is back to sleep on his own. He just needs to get over feeling like he needs to eat at 10:00 p.m. and then if you want to hang on to the 2:00 a.m. bottle for awhile and see if he weans off it on his own, that’s fine.

Be careful with any night feed; I always suggest to parents that they make sure they are not using the bottle as a prop. He should not be falling back to sleep on the bottle. He should have his bottle and stay awake through the bottle to go back to the crib awake. That usually helps get rid of the nighttime feed because if it is not truly about hunger and it is not about a prop then there is no reason to keep waking up at 2:00 a.m. for a bottle. Certainly, by month six, if he has not weaned off the nighttime feed on his own, I would consider doing it for him. Again, as long as he is healthy and of a good weight, six months is a good time to start encouraging a baby to sleep all the way through the night.

Thanks a lot for your question Stacy, and sleep well.