Breaking the nightly bottle habit

I get this question from moms all the time, so I thought I'd touch on it here.  

“My 10-month-old goes to bed with a bottle and wakes for a bottle in the night. How do I break her of this habit?”

Good question! When you put your baby in bed at night, including the bottle in her routine is fine. You could start with a bath, pyjamas, her bottle, and a story or two.

You really want to avoid giving her the bottle until she falls asleep or putting her in her crib with the bottle. You do not want your baby to fall asleep with a bottle in her mouth because if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she thinks she needs that bottle again to sleep. If you come with her bottle and feed her to sleep or put it into the crib, she sucks herself back to sleep with the bottle.

Not only is that hard for her sleep strategies, but it is also very damaging to her teeth, which are coming in, so start the bottle earlier in your routine. You can have a bath, then her bottle, brush her teeth and then come back for some stories, but you should be putting her into the crib awake and without a bottle. If you follow gentle sleep training guidelines, I will give you some strategies to deal with the two weeks it will probably take to get her on track, learning a new strategy for getting herself to sleep.

You don’t have to leave the room; you can stay with her if you like, but she really does need to start connecting the steps that are involved in putting herself to sleep independently so that she is not relying on that bottle! Otherwise, she will most likely keep waking for that bottle. It could go on well into the second year, so you really want to make sure you break this habit now. Then, when she wakes in the night requesting a bottle, you’ll have to decline that request.

You can go in, you can stay with her and “ride it out,” basically, but she will learn a new way to sleep, and she will start sleeping a solid night, which will be better for her. It will be better for her in the sense that she is not falling asleep with the bottle in her mouth and, so, it may take about two weeks, but it is definitely for the best.

If you are having trouble dropping your little sleepers nightly bottle habit and you want a tailored plan and support to help you teach them independent sleep skills and strategies book your Free 20-Minute Sleep Evaluation Call to learn more about how I can help change your life into one where everyone gets the sleep they need.

Author

Erin Neri - Certified Pediatric Sleep Consultant and Owner of To The Moon and Back Sleep Consulting since 2016. 

Proud mother of 2 young school aged boys who did not come into the world  preprogrammed with independent sleep skills. 28+ years of training & experience working with children and families including her BA in Applied Psychology, Infant Mental Health Training, Early Childhood Education & Experience. Completed Integrative Feeding Specialist Certification.