When it comes to getting babies to sleep through the night, one of the most common pieces of advice is to start the baby on solid food.
Perhaps you’ve even heard about the old “cereal in the bottle” routine that’s been used for generations.
I can understand why this is a common belief. As adults, we know how difficult it can be to sleep on an empty stomach. We also know how tired we feel after we eat a full course meal.
So it seems reasonable to believe that giving some solid food or adding a little cereal to their bottle should take longer to digest than breastmilk or formula, which will keep them feeling fuller for longer, and therefore help them sleep through the night.
Now, any parent of a baby who isn’t sleeping well is likely eager to try just about anything they consider safe and potentially effective in order to get any kind of sleep.
Unfortunately, most parents who try this tactic find that, even if it seems to work at first, the results are only temporary, and here’s the reason why…
Once your baby reaches a certain age and weight, (let’s just use 6 months for the sake of simplicity) waking in the night likely isn’t due to hunger. I’ve heard from parents who were up multiple times in the night to feed their six, seven, or eight-month-old baby.
Sure, baby probably nursed a little or took part of a bottle every time it was offered, but that doesn’t mean that they were hungry.
What is much more likely is that baby has become dependent on nursing or having a bottle and that is their strategy for falling asleep.
After all, if they’ve spent the first six months of their lives falling asleep while nursing or drinking a bottle, it makes sense that they won’t know how to fall asleep any other way.
And another thing, this whole notion of solid foods or cereal in the bottle works on the assumption that babies fall asleep at bedtime and don’t wake until morning. But that’s not how sleep works – for babies or adults. We all sleep in cycles ranging from light sleep to deep sleep, and at the end of each cycle, we come to the surface and wake up ever so slightly.
A baby’s sleep cycle is typically about 45 minutes. So even on a good night, they’re going to wake up a lot. And if the only way they know how to get back to sleep is by nursing or having a bottle, they’re going to cry out, and you’re going to have to go back in and feed them again.
So if your baby is feeding out of habit rather than hunger, how can you help them sleep through the night?
There is no quick fix, but the solution is teaching your baby to fall asleep independently.
If that seems a little daunting, I want to assure you that they’re fully capable of learning this valuable skill. Most babies will learn their own sleep strategy a lot quicker than you would expect. Some will babble to themselves for a bit, or play with their toes, or suck on their fingers. They practice it, and then it becomes a skill.
Now, I’m not saying that you should leave a crying baby to work it out themselves, without any comfort or attention. You should feel free to attend to them, let them know you’re nearby and available, but don’t nurse, bottle-feed, rock, or cuddle them until they fall asleep. Let them find a way to do it on their own. That way, when they wake in the night, they’ll have the skills they need to settle back down on their own.