Will Starting Solids Help My Baby Sleep Through The Night?
Will solids help my baby sleep better? I have been asked this question many times in my 1:1 packages. So I decided to write about this in detail.
We’ve all heard the old wives tales related to helping your baby sleep through the night:
- Put rice cereal in their bedtime bottle
- Drink a Guinness Beer before your last nursing session of the day
- Flip your baby over, literally holding them upside down from their feet, to switch their days and nights (that one was new to me but the internet can’t lie right!?)
In the news was a study published in the Journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics which concluded: “the early introduction of solids into the infant’s diet was associated with longer sleep duration, less frequent waking at night, and a reduction in reported very serious sleep problems.”
Hold the phone…… So starting solids earlier helps your baby sleep through the night?
Listen Here
Why These findings Make Me Cringe:
- I worry about all those Moms working so hard to breastfeed their babies, getting the message that starting solids earlier, possibly at the expense of breastfeeding, could help them sleep through the night.
- In addition, I’ve worked with so many parents with babies older than 6 months of age taking solids and still waking up every 3 hours at night to feed.
- I know that starting solids alone is not the answer to getting your child to sleep through the night.
- Potentially it could help at the right time, but you’ll be sorely disappointed if you expect your 4-month-old to take rice cereal in her bottle and consequently sleep 11 hours without feeding. The same goes for your 9-month old who nurses 3 x per night.
- Another consideration for those of you breastfeeding is the impact of that long stretch of sleep between feeds at an early age and the impact on your milk supply.
- Due to the hormone prolactin, a mother’s milk supply is generally the highest between 1 and 5 am.
- Naturally, you’ll see the first stretch of sleep to be the longest, then baby wakes to feed sometime between 1 and 5 am.
- Dropping that feed too soon could impact your supply.
Does formula vs breastfeeding impact the age at which babies sleep through the night?
In my experience, kids do sleep through the night at different ages. However, the most compelling factor of whether a child will sleep long stretches or not at night is related to your child’s self-soothing skills.
Self-soothing skills are often repetitive actions that help your child relax him/herself so s/he can drift off into sleep. You can read more about why your child needs self-soothing skills in this blog post.
Self-soothing skills include:
- Humming or moaning
- Sucking a thumb or finger
- Sleeping in a certain position
- Rubbing a piece of soft material between thumb and fingers.
Take-Home Points:
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- The right combination of foods may help your child have longer stretches of sleep, but one also needs to consider sleeping habits.
- A child with poor self-soothing skills will never be a great sleeper regardless of his/her intake of solids.
- Don’t give up on breastfeeding because you think formula will solve your sleep problems. It won’t.
If you’ve been thinking about sleep training, I can teach you everything you need to know about setting your child up for successful sleep.
How have starting solids impacted your baby’s sleep?? Share it in the comments and hear from other parents just like you!
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Sending sleepy vibes and sweet dreams your way!
Erin McCormick
Your Pediatric Sleep Specialist