This last week been we celebrated world breastfeeding week, it was amazing to read everyone’s stories about their breast feeding experience.

Breast feeding can be a real challenge for some mums and can be a piece of cake for others, I am always in awe of how far some mums will go to do the best for their baby whether its a long difficult breastfeeding journey or endless nights of sleep training, or health problems.

A quick poll on the Baby Sleep Consultant face book page confirms what I stand by, and that is breast feeding or formula feeding – just as many babies have sleep issues at night – so don’t feel pressured to switch to formula for a better nights sleep. I always encourage mums to seek help from a lactation consultant if we suspect baby is waking excessively from hunger at night and they are breastfed, especially in the early days mums get your feeding sorted before you stress about night time sleep.

I do find breastfeeding mothers are more inclined to have the issue of feeding to sleep after 4 months – so keep this in mind, and try to begin your “putting baby to bed drowsy but awake” journey between 12-16 weeks to ensure this doesn’t happen to you. If you find yourself feeding to sleep every 2 hours at night, stop and try to settle your baby some other way for every second wake up – I know that breast milk can be digested in 2 hours, but a baby over 12-16 weeks can sleep for more than 2 hours even if all their milk has been digested.

Whether your baby is breastfed or formula fed or mix fed, they can all have healthy sleep habits with a little bit of guidance from you as parents. After 4 months whether they are boob or bottle – hunger is not responsible for a large portion of sleep problems at night, so if your contemplating giving up breast feeding for a better nights sleep – think twice, flick me an email and we can see if your sleep problem is hunger related or not.