How to get your breastfed baby to fall asleep without nursing
The title of this post makes me sound like I’m an expert on sleeping habits, but it’s really more of a question that I’ve been exploring for the past few months myself.
At 8 months, Lil’ Cub still frequently nurses to sleep and has a hard time sleeping otherwise. The sleeping problems started around 3 months when we stopped swaddling and he started teething. Then when he was between 3 and 6 months old, we took him on several long distance trips, which not only completely messed up his sleeping habits but also brought about a lot of inconsistency and stress for him. There were many situations where I desperately needed to calm him down or get him to nap (e.g. on the plane or before taking him out to dinner), and nursing was the most effective way to do it. Before I knew it, it had become a habit.
I’m not saying that nursing a baby to sleep is bad. Most the time, I really enjoy the quiet cuddling, and when he falls asleep in my arms, he has the sweetest and most comfortable expression in the world! Nursing is not only warm and nourishing, but the milk has sleep inducing hormones too, so it’s only natural that babies fall asleep. However, it becomes a problem when:
the baby relies too much on nursing and can’t soothe himself back to sleep when he transitions between sleep cycles
the baby wakes when I put him in the crib and cries because he’s startled or my nipple is no longer in his mouth
Since I’ve decided not to do the cry-it-out method for various reasons, I’ve spent the past two months experimenting with different ways to get Lil’ Cub to sleep without completely nursing him into it. Here are some methods that have worked with mixed success:
1) When he starts to transition from big gulp drinking to light comfort sucking, I squeeze more milk into his mouth so that if he’s really no longer hungry, he will unlatch himself before he falls asleep completely. While this is kind of like nursing a baby to sleep, it somehow makes the transition into the crib a lot easier because he’s still 10% awake when he goes in. Works 90% of the time.
2) I nurse him until he’s sleepy, break his latch, and then do one calm activity (e.g. changing his diaper, patting him lightly, singing a song, zipping him into his sleep sack) before putting him into bed. Works 50% of the time, at least once a day, usually when he is already very sleepy but also very calm (doesn’t work when he is very sleepy but also very fussy).
3) Every night and naptime, I use music from a certain lullaby-playing rabbit to calm him down and signal that it’s sleep time. Sometimes, when he is already very calm, this works with method 2) above.
4) I vary soothing methods and get my husband to help so that the breast or my presence is not the only sleep association for him. The stroller works pretty well. Rocking him or singing to him while he’s in the crib works only if he is extremely sleepy and has nursed within the last hour.
5) If he’s in a calm but tired mood, I sometimes put him in the crib, lie down in the futon next to him, and pretend to sleep. There have been a few times where he glanced at me, saw I was asleep, shuffled a bit, then closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep himself. I call this the copycat method. It works every once in a while and only when he is in a super good mood.
6) If he still cries after the second time I try to put him in the crib, I might do a modified cry-it-out where I sternly tell him that he must stay in the bed, leave him to cry for 5-10 minutes, then either go back in and pat him to sleep (while he’s in the crib) or ask my husband to go to him. At this point, he usually doesn’t put up a fight, either because he’s tired from crying or he knows I’m serious about not picking him up if he cries. Sometimes, if he’s making whiny noises (ehhh...ehhh...ehhh...) instead of bawling right out (wahhhhh!!!), I let him do that till he falls asleep.
Like I said, these methods have worked with mixed success. At times, I’m persistent about making him fall asleep on his own; at other times, I still end up nursing him to sleep because the whole family gets more sleep that way. I still enjoy nursing him to sleep and don’t want to make sleep time a battleground; the idea is to give him many opportunities to practice his sleeping skills so that he will eventually learn how to fall asleep by himself. It seems that feeling calm and secure are the most important factors for Lil’ Cub to sleep well, so I will work on cultivating his sense of confidence in his surroundings. Meanwhile, I feel comforted by this article, which says that learning to fall asleep is a milestone that babies will eventually reach!
