How to wean a one and a half year old child from night feeding. When to finish night feeding. Bottle in the crib and pacifier: is it help or an illusion

One of the main concerns of breastfeeding mothers is chronic sleep deprivation. A newborn needs breast milk around the clock every three to four hours. But by six to seven months, night feedings for a baby become more of a habit than a need of the body. Some parents are beginning to realize that it is time to wean their baby from night feedings.

First necessary condition, in order to, is a consultation with a pediatrician. He knows your baby from birth and will surely advise the best time to wean from night feedings.

The second necessary condition to wean the baby from night feedings is the age of the child. Night feedings are vital for newborn babies up to at least six months of age.

At what age to wean from night feedings

The newborn should have the following feeding regimen:

• an infant before the age of three months needs two or three nightly feedings.
• a baby who is three to six months old needs one nightly feeding.
• for a child who is seven months old or older, night feedings can be canceled. Can't be weaned month old baby from night feedings - he simply will not be able to grow and develop normally, and this will greatly affect his health.

Especially if the child is already a year old or even two years old, night feedings become useless. The child during the day should receive the food necessary for growth and development, and at night the baby needs sleep more than food. If a one-year-old or two-year-old baby demands to be fed at night, then during the day he experienced a lot of stress (he needs the attention of his parents) or is simply hungry.

Each child is individual, each has its own character and habits. It is also important that the mixture is fed to the baby or breast milk. Therefore, it is up to the parents of the newborn to decide whether to remove night feedings or not, and at what age this should be done.

It is also very important for a nursing mother to maintain night feeding for some time, because breast milk, which the baby will need throughout the day, is produced with three hours night until eight o'clock in the morning.

In addition, at a time when the newborn is sick, or stressed, it is better for the baby not to change his habits. To refuse night feedings, you need to choose the right moment.

Weaning from night feeds without stress for the newborn

There are a few tips to help you avoid nighttime feedings.

Council the first.

Reconsider the daily routine and the feeding regimen of the child. Try to make sure that the baby eats a little more during the day. And in the evening (before going to bed), the portion of the child was the maximum. It will be better if the feeding hours are the same - this way you will quickly accustom the child to the daily routine.

Tip two.

Make sure that the child moves more during the day (accordingly, expends more energy, which means he eats more). Before going to bed, calm games are preferable. It will be very good if the baby is bathed before going to bed in warm bath and give him a massage. This will relax him and prepare him for sleep. It also helps with night feedings.

Tip three.

From birth, babies get used to the fact that after they suck on the breast (bottle), you need to sleep. To wean from night feedings, you need to stop this conditioned reflex. It is necessary to make it clear to the baby that feeding is feeding, and sleep is sleep. Therefore, between feeding and sleep, it is better to take some action or change the situation. Try not to feed your baby where he sleeps. And put in the room where he eats. To wean a newborn from night feeding, after you feed him, you can turn on the night light. Another option is to ask dad to put the newborn to bed.

Tip four.

When the baby wakes up at night, do not rush to breastfeed him, wait a bit. It happens that the baby just had a dream, or he wanted to drink. Suggest to him. Water is best given to a child not in a bottle with a nipple, but in a drinking bowl.

Tip five.

It is not necessary to give tea to the newborn instead of night feeding or. Firstly, sweetened tea or compote will ruin the child's teeth. Secondly, this will not solve the problem, and the baby will continue to eat at night after a year.

Tip six.

If the baby is eating, first increase the daily norm of the milk mixture by ten to twenty grams, and reduce the nightly portion by this number. After a while, dilute the nighttime portion with water more and more each time. Soon the baby will refuse to eat the tasteless mixture at all.

Tip seven.

To wean a child from night feeding after a year, you can try to explain to the baby in a language he understands that you need to sleep at night and not eat. Tell the child that mom and dad are sleeping, all toys are sleeping at night too. Therefore, the son (daughter) also needs to sleep at night.

Tip eight.

Usually parents are happy when a newborn sleeps well and for a long time during the day. But having slept during the day, at night he begins to play, demand food and not sleep. Don't be afraid to wake your kids up daytime- let them better sleep longer and more soundly at night. And the parents themselves will have a good rest at this time.

Tip nine.

Do not try to wean your baby from night feedings using mustard or green tea for the nipples. This will not help, and will only upset or frighten the baby. It can also cause burns to the oral mucosa in a child.

Tip ten.

During weaning from night feedings, try to hug and stroke the baby more often, be with him all the time. He just needs your support. And even more so, do not give the baby at this stressful moment to grandparents and other relatives.

Tip Eleven.

This advice is from the famous pediatrician Dr. Komarovsky. He believes that the refusal of night feeding is directly related to the conditions in which the newborn falls asleep. (temperature about twenty degrees) with a little high humidity more conducive to a deep night's sleep of the baby than a warm bedroom with dry air.

Doctor Komarovsky suggests that you first create such conditions in the baby’s bedroom, put on warm pajamas, and then offer to refuse night feeding. In addition, the refusal of night feeding will be easier when the baby takes a cool bath and eats well before bedtime (about eleven in the evening). Moreover, the previous feeding should not completely saturate the child.

How to wean a child from night feeding - the opinion of Dr. Komarovsky:

How many hours should a newborn sleep

A newborn child up to six months should sleep from sixteen to twenty hours. From six months to a year, a baby usually spends fourteen to fifteen hours sleeping. One year old baby sleep needs thirteen to fourteen hours, and a baby who is over two years old needs up to thirteen hours of sleep.

In order to stop night feedings, first, first consult your doctor. Secondly, determine how you decide to do it - abruptly or gradually. The gradual cessation of night feedings has a gentle effect on the newborn, and with a sharp cessation of night feedings, the child experiences severe stress. It will be much better and calmer for both the baby and the mother, if you gradually change the daily routine and the child's feeding regimen. This, of course, will bring both mother and baby out for a while, but then the whole family will sleep peacefully every night.

Some mothers begin to reproach and scold themselves for wanting to stop night feedings. Do not do this - night sleep For a baby, this is the same necessity as daily nutrition. Because during a night's sleep, the baby's brain develops, and the body rests. And a well-rested mother the next day is full of strength and energy, and, importantly, she is in a great mood.

How to wean a child from night feeding - this question begins to bother mothers about six months after the birth of the baby. Pediatricians believe that feeding at night is advisable up to a year of life. But psychologists recommend continuing up to 2 years, because the baby so needs constant contact with his mother. So when to wean a child from night feeding so as not to harm him?

Experienced mothers are advised to start gradual weaning after the first 6-7 months of life. At first, you can try to replace one feeding with plain water or compote. This stabilizes the bowels and dulls the feeling of hunger, so the baby will feel full, at least for a short time. Mothers who are breastfeeding should shorten each nightly feeding of their baby. Gradually, the baby will understand that the night is a time for sleep, and not for food. However, children who are breastfed, unfortunately, take a change in diet very painfully. Therefore, mothers will have to spend several sleepless nights lulling the baby. The main thing is in no case to compromise when offering breasts. Mother's milk has a sedative effect. Babies sleep well after feeding. But, having yielded once, the mother risks feeding the child at night until she is weaned.

It is much easier to wean a baby from nighttime bottle feeding because, despite the usefulness mother's milk, the mixture is more high-calorie. A baby who eats well before going to bed sleeps better. Therefore, many mothers postpone the feeding time to the evening and try to give the child a formula closer to midnight.

European pediatricians, advising how to wean a child from night feeding after a year, focus on psychological aspect relationship between mother and child. Growing up, the child feels panic because the mother is no longer central figure in his life. Therefore, the feeding ritual for the baby is more of an attempt to be close to the mother. So, it is possible to wean from such a regime only thanks to affection, care and attention. Mom must show the child that she is always ready to take him in her arms. After all, some mothers take the baby in their arms only when it's time to eat.

In order to wean from night feeding at 1.5, 2 years, mothers have to learn to negotiate with the baby. Experts recommend explaining to the child what you can eat with the first sunbeams. If the baby does not agree to wait for the sun, you need to find strength in yourself and in no case give in. You can also tell a fairy tale to the baby that the bear ate at night, and his tummy started to hurt. In the early days, it is likely that the child will wake up and still ask for food. Then you need to offer him a drink of water or read him a fairy tale. Despite the fatigue, the mother must understand that only her perseverance will help wean the child from night feedings. Some pediatricians advise giving children special soothing drops or teas at night. However, before resorting to such a remedy, it is necessary to consult a neurologist. If the child had a traumatic brain injury, increased intracranial pressure or other neurological problems are observed, sedatives may aggravate his condition.

In the US, pediatric doctors say that night feeding is inevitable stage V child development, it passes when the baby's nervous system fully matures. But if a mother feels physical discomfort from such a diet, she should distract him from food in every possible way: collect the designer at 2 am, sing lullabies at 5 am, or just sit next to the baby, telling him fairy tales until he falls asleep. There are special conspiracies that allow you to lull a child. They are actively used by mothers from Russian and Ukrainian outbacks. However, doctors believe that this is just self-hypnosis, giving mothers the strength to survive the first sleepless nights accompanying the transition to a new regime.

A year ago, I faced a huge problem: my son, who was almost a year and a half, began to wake up at night to eat almost every hour - much more often than he did in the first months of his life! I must tell you that at that moment I was already almost on the verge of exhaustion, because from the moment he was born, I never slept longer than 3-4 hours in a row. Now I know that this is called "sleep deprivation", and that such a state is extremely dangerous for the mental and physical health person. And then I thought that I was just " good mom”, because I feed my baby on demand. And everyone was waiting for him to “outgrow” this and stop waking up at night.

The reason to seriously think about our lifestyle was precisely the fact that after a year David began to wake up only more often, not less often, and hung on his chest longer! He could wake up and then not fall asleep for an hour. When I tried to stop feeding, he raised a terrible cry and woke up the whole family, and the neighbors to boot. At that time, we just arrived in America and lived in a 4-apartment building. The walls there are so thin that we could hear our neighbors yawning (I'm serious), not to mention how a child can scream in the middle of the night! That's when I started to google "how to wean a baby" - because feeding had already begun to irritate me, and not pleasure and happiness, as it was before. And I thought it was the only way wean him from eating at night.

I must say that despite the abundance of forums and articles on this topic, it turned out to be extremely difficult to fish out something useful. I even took a screenshot of some of the “advice” - they were too idiotic))) In the style of “draw a scary face on the chest so that the child is scared and does not want to take it in his mouth.” Well, or "put a shoe brush in the bra - so that he thinks that his chest is hairy, and he is also scared." And about “spread with mustard, brilliant green”, I think you yourself have heard more than once. As a person with a mind, I understood that I would not do anything like that. Also, the advice “leave the baby for a few days or a week, and come home when the milk has already burned out” did not suit me. Honestly? I consider it a crime. In one of the most difficult periods in the life of a child - weaning - to leave him without a mother ... It was not at all surprising for me to read how one girl said that after such a “weaning”, upon her arrival, the child simply did not look in her direction. He just pretended she wasn't there. And how she cried and persuaded him to hug her. It reminded me of a documentary about attachment violation - "John". The most offensive thing is that it was difficult for her herself all this time without him, she left him not because she was “bad”, but because she sincerely believed that this was the right method.

And just at that time, we accidentally got to a doctor of Ukrainian origin, who has been working as a doctor in Chicago for many years. And after the examination, I asked him: “Tell me, please, what should I do with night feedings? Since he wakes up, it means he is hungry, so he needs to be fed? Or is it still not necessary? And he replied: “After 6 months, the baby is able to sleep through the night without waking up to feed or drink. The only reason he wakes up is because he is producing gastric juice. On schedule. Because he's so used to it. Because you fed him at night yesterday, the day before yesterday, and the day before yesterday. So it's a chain reaction. And the only way to teach him not to wake up is to stop feeding at night. He doesn't need food at night. That's why he eats worse during the day. Because it distributes calories incorrectly throughout the day. As soon as you stop feeding him at night, he will begin to get those calories during the day, and sleep soundly at night. Gastric juice will cease to be produced, and will not wake him up! For his development, for the development of his central nervous system, it is essential to sleep through the night.”

These words made me look at the situation VERY DIFFERENTLY. I no longer thought that I was doing something good, mocking myself like that (I really could hardly withstand such a regimen) and, it turns out, not allowing it to develop nervous system. "But how then to wean him - to stop breastfeeding?". He replied: “You can continue to feed during the day if you want. One has nothing to do with the other at all. Just stop feeding at night. He will protest, shout so that the neighbors will call the police. But after 2 weeks he will get used to not eating at night. The main thing - do not replace anything. No water, no mixture, no compote. Because then he will wake up to "drink". Your task is to show him that they sleep at night. They don’t eat, they don’t drink, but they SLEEP.”

A few days after that, I gathered my courage, made a plan. And so, in one beautiful evening started to implement it. I will say right away that I was preparing for two weeks of screaming at night - but everything went much better. The first night was very hard. The second and third went much smoother. And on the fourth he had already slept until morning. I'll tell you in order, with all the important nuances.

Preparation. In the afternoon, I began to prepare David for the fact that from this day on he will learn to sleep all night without waking up. And that he's old enough to not eat at night. “So eat more now, because I won’t feed you at night.” I doubt he understood what in question, but I was still calmer at the thought that I did not hit him on the head with a butt, when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I refuse him food at night. In the evening before going to bed, I fed him and again said: “Now you eat before going to bed, and then you will only eat in the morning. At night, even if you ask very hard, I will not be able to give you milk, because my task is to teach you to sleep all night.”

Performance. It is very important to wear tight clothes(golf) so that he cannot take what he needs (as they can). When he woke up, I spoke to him in a gentle but confident voice: “We don’t eat at night. We sleep at night now." I repeated this several times. If I continued to ask, I explained: “I know, son, that you want to eat. But now we are weaning ourselves from eating at night. You can, you will succeed. Just be patient. You can eat when the morning comes." At the same time, she stroked him constantly, hugged him. He pushed my hands away))) I continued to spin my record. It is very important to decide once and for all. If you started this, then in no case should you give up because of his tears - you will only show that you were deceiving him, saying that you can’t eat anymore at night (now it’s possible), that you tortured him in vain (after all, it turns out, they could still feed, but they didn’t), and, of course, you show that you can change your mind with a strong cry. Therefore, once you start on this path, there is no turning back.

He fell asleep after a while, after a few hours he could wake up again - and again. I told him how much I love him, that I wouldn’t refuse anything just like that, that it would benefit both of us. That it’s also very hard for me now, but we both need to be patient in order to sleep well later.

We continue to feed in the morning. As soon as morning came, I fed him myself, without waiting for him to raise a cry. This calmed him down a lot. He understood that they were not completely taking away his chest, that in the morning he would receive it.

Subsequent nights. Everything was the same, but he woke up less often, cried less, fell asleep faster. In the morning, with pleasure and happiness, he pounced on his chest. On the third night, I decided not to feed him at night. Because I wanted to teach him to fall asleep without a breast. I also cried a lot (it was the hardest thing). I stroked him, told a story for an hour until he fell asleep. Reassured by the fact that in the morning he would be able to eat. That helped.

Result. On the fourth night he did not wake up. It was our first night in a year and a half, when I fell asleep in the evening and woke up in the morning! I still remember this moment

It was my dream, which seemed impossible. And it came true in three days, albeit hard work.

Summary: I like this “method”, if it can be called that, because in such a difficult period for a child, I was next to him, supported him, reassured him, showed that I was not doing this out of evil, and not because I fell out of love. She said that I believe in him, that he will definitely learn to sleep all night without food. And that it is also hard for me to refuse him that he loves so much. It helped me not to lose his trust, to keep our connection. And most importantly, it helped me a lot to finally sleep. For those who would like to continue breastfeeding, this is the only way to help sleep at night without weaning the baby. Well, I repeat: it is very important not to replace feeding with anything else. The child should lose the motivation to wake up for the sake of something.

This method is universal, in fact. The same may be true for mothers whose babies wake up for a bottle of formula or water. It is also a bridge to soft weaning from the chest, which I talk about here.

With the introduction of complementary foods, that is, at the age of 4-6 months, most children are well fed during the day, and night feedings are no longer required for their development.

So, in principle, you can try to wean your child from night feedings from the age of 6 months. Many children by this age are not at all hungry at night, they just have a stable habit of waking up at night. Mom should be aware that the weaning process may take some time and in any case will be associated with some additional inconvenience that causes lack of sleep. Therefore, you first need to analyze your own readiness to wean the child from night feedings. After a year, it will be much easier to do this.

But in addition to satisfying the purely physiological need for food, the child, through feeding, makes up for the lack of communication with the mother. This becomes especially noticeable when the baby is sick, or he is teething, or during the day he does not see his mother. In such cases, the child requires attention at night, asks for a breast or a bottle. Therefore, in the process of weaning from night feedings during the day, it is worth giving him maximum useful time to ensure psychological comfort, and the baby did not need to be convinced of his mother's love in dark time days.

Ways to wean your baby from night feedings

• Gradually replace feedings with water. First, invite the child to just drink water in one nightly feeding. If you do not get water right away, then you can dilute the milk or mixture in a ratio of 1 to 3, nightly increasing the amount of water in the mixture. Soon the child will not be interested in waking up to drink some water, and, perhaps, in a simple way reduce the number of night feedings.
• Reduce the duration of night feeding when breastfeeding. It is necessary to teach the baby that the night is a time for sleep, and not for food, and you should not use the breast as a dummy.
• Increase intervals between feedings, different ways lulling the child during nocturnal awakenings (songs, motion sickness, fairy tales, stroking).
• Feed at night with formula or porridge so that the baby digests food for a long time and does not feel hunger. But this is not suitable for all children, many babies, on the contrary, find it difficult to digest heavy food during sleep, constantly wake up and behave restlessly due to a full stomach.
• Increase the number of breastfeeds throughout the day. When breastfeeding, night feeding usually remains the last feeding before the final weaning, but in the case when the mother wants to keep breast-feeding, but to reduce the number of night feedings, it is worthwhile to satisfy the baby's need for the breast as much as possible during the day.
• Change the way the child is laid down. Drastically euthanize the child without feeding or, after breastfeeding a little, transfer to the crib. You can put the baby to sleep while walking in a stroller or give it to dad for motion sickness.
• Restrict breast access at night. At co-sleeping, waking up and not immediately finding the nipple, the child simply sticks his mother in the side and falls asleep, because he is not really hungry, but simply satisfies his need for closeness to his mother.
• sleep separately– in different beds or in different rooms. In cases where the baby wakes up, you can lie down next to him to soothe or feed, but then still go to your bed.
• Explain. children older than a year it is already possible to explain that no one eats at night, everyone sleeps, and there will be food when it becomes light. This must be constantly repeated both at night, when waking up, and during the day, during games. Moreover, it is important not to deviate from your own words, and if the child still requires food, in every possible way to distract from this, tell tales, rock him in his arms, and do a light massage. You can offer water.

If you see that the child began to behave very capriciously, aggressively, his daytime sleep, he does not let you go a single step during the day, or, on the contrary, repels you, perhaps he is not yet ripe in order to completely abandon night feedings.

It is the daytime behavior of the baby that will tell you if you are moving in the right direction. You should not ignore the reactions of the child, sometimes it is better to slow down or completely abandon the idea for a while so as not to injure the baby, depriving him of a sense of trust in the world. After all, the period when the baby is in dire need of you is, in fact, so short that later you will remember your nightly feedings with nostalgia, waiting for your grown-up child from the disco.