Your baby’s sleep will change so many times over the first year, from the endless loop of eat-change-sleep in the newborn stage to regressions, teething spells, and ever-evolving schedules. One of the biggest game-changers is night weaning—finally dropping those middle-of-the-night feeds so you can all sleep a good long stretch from dusk ’til dawn (what a dream!). But how do you know when your babe is ready?
Related: Baby Sleep Coach Shares Her Top Tips for Stopping 5 A.M. Wake-Ups
“Many babies are ready and capable of sleeping all the way through the night without a feed somewhere between four and six months,” says baby sleep coach Katy Bourzikas in a recent TikTok. “But what it boils down to is if it’s working for you or not.” After all, every parent is different and so are their kiddos, so what matters is whether your particular baby is ready to drop the feeds and whether you are, too.
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♬ original sound – Katy—Baby Sleep Coach
If you’re wondering how to tell when they’re ready, here are Bourzikas’s four signs that it’s time for everyone to sleep through the night:
1. When you offer a night feed your baby treats you like a pacifier.
Sometimes a baby is legitimately hungry in the middle of the night, and other times they’ve just here to use your boobs or bottle as a comfort object. And who can blame them? The first sign that they’re probably not the hungry kind is when “your baby uses [the feed] to comfort suck and falls asleep quickly,” explains Bourzikas. One of the tell-tale signs is that they pass out long before they’ve finished the full feed. Well played, munchkin.
2. They wake up every couple of hours throughout the night.
The baby monitor startling you every one or two hours throughout the night? Your infant is probably not hungry. Bourzikas says that if your baby can’t sleep a solid stretch, “this is usually a sign that they’re using the breast or bottle as a soothing mechanism and are having trouble settling without it.” What they really need is to learn how to self-soothe so they can get back to sleep on their own and finally get those nice long stretches.
Helping your baby to develop good sleep habits is a skill they’ll use throughout their lives. Some good places to start once they’re out of the newborn stage are:
- Develop a consistent bedtime routine that helps them wind down and signals that bedtime is coming—think bath, massage, dim lights, stories, feed.
- Put them to bed at a consistent time each night and wake at a consistent time each morning.
- Put them down sleepy but awake so they slowly learn to fall asleep independently.
- If they wake in the night, wait a few minutes to let them try to self-soothe (sometimes they end up falling back asleep on their own!).
3. They wake up at the same time every night despite eating well during the day.
“If your baby is getting plenty of daytime calories but they keep waking up at the same time every night no matter what happens during the day,” says Bourzikas, “this is likely a habitual wakeup and they don’t necessarily need this feed out of nutrition.” It’s easy to assume that if your infant is waking up at the same time every night to snack, that’s probably when their tummies start to feel empty, but it’s not necessarily so.
You also run the risk of getting into a ‘reverse cycle feeding pattern,’ when your little one starts eating more overnight to help them fall back to sleep and it starts impacting their daytime appetite, which leads to even more nighttime feeds.
4. Baby struggles to get back to sleep after a feed.
When baby stops getting drowsy and milk-drunk after those middle-of-the-night meals, they probably don’t need them. “A feed if truly needed should make a baby fall back asleep and then sleep a nice long stretch,” stresses Bourzikas. “So if you have to support your baby and they really struggle to fall back asleep after a feed, it’s likely that they don’t actually need it.”
And hey, if you enjoy those cozy middle-of-the-night cuddles and feeds, power to you! Just because your baby might technically be ready to drop them, it doesn’t mean you have to. On the flip side, if you can’t wait to night wean, look out for these signs.
