If you’re a parent, you’ve most likely struggled with multiple night wakings at some point. That ultimately leads to parents googling how to find a “fix” and help their baby sleep longer stretches at night. One popular “solution” is the dream feed. I’m not a fan. Let me explain more about it and why.
What Is A Dream Feed?
A dream feed is a feed given several hours after your baby has gone to sleep for the night and right before you go to bed. Most likely sometime between 9 pm-11 pm. The goal is to give your baby a feed while they are asleep or mostly asleep and then return them to the crib with minimal interruption to sleep. The idea is that your baby gets a full belly and it will buy you and your baby several more hours of sleep.
If you are doing this and it’s working well for you, there is no need to change a thing. Most of the families I work with do not see a massive difference in the time baby wakes up in the middle of the night or a decrease in the number of night wakings when they give a dream feed. If you give your baby a dream feed at 10 pm, but your baby still wakes up just a few hours later, it’s not working.
What About Night Feeds?
Newborns need to be fed multiple times a night. Once a baby is 4 months old and ready to learn independent sleep skills, they can start to sleep longer stretches at night and have 0-1 night feeds. If your baby is thriving and over 6 months old, they can most likely sleep 11-12 hours at night without a nighttime feed.
If your baby still has a night feed my #1 suggestion is to ensure they are fully awake during the feed. Why is this important? It’s important to allow your baby to learn to fall asleep without relying on being fed. If they rely on the feed to get to sleep initially at night, they will need it every time they come out of a sleep cycle throughout the night. And that can mean every 60-90 minutes. Sound familiar? If so, your babe is probably going through the dreaded 4-month sleep regression.
Why I Don’t Recommend A Dream Feed
For most babies, a dream feed doesn’t lengthen the chunks of sleep a baby gets, it just shifts when the feed is happening. The goal is to get longer stretches of nighttime sleep, about 6 hours or more. Some babies, will have a dream feed and still wake up only a few hours later so the dream feed is simply adding in another feed that the baby hasn’t requested.
If a baby is asleep or partially asleep, they are most likely not feeding well because there isn’t going to be a brain/stomach connection with food intake. When we eat and are aware of the feeling of becoming full, we finish a meal feeling satisfied. That connection piece is missing with a dream feed. It’s like mindless snacking.
The dream feed becomes a habit. If you habitually wake baby up around the same time each night, the natural sleep pattern is being interrupted and it can become a habit for them to wake up at that time, even if they aren’t hungry.
So Now What Do You Do?
If you are doing a dream feed and it’s working for you and your baby, keep right on doing it.
If the dream feed isn’t getting you and your baby to longer stretches of sleep (6 hours or more) at night, I’d suggest stopping it. How do you do it? You just stop. That’s it. When you’re baby naturally wakes up for a feed, wait just a few minutes to make sure they aren’t going back to sleep and offer the feed when they are hungry and keep them awake.