NIGHT WEANING
How to know if you’re ready to nightwean your little one?
Breastfeeding is an intimate process. The amount of times you nurse, how long each nursing sessions lasts, the position that nursing feels the most comfortable in, whether your child wants to stay latched afterwards, if they’re able to be supported to sleep other ways… it is unique to each parent - child dyad. And just like starting breastfeeding, ending it is an intimate - and unique - process as well.
You may have spent weeks, months, or even years nursing your little one back to sleep at night, and ending it will be a big transition for you both. It can bring up feelings of guilt, hesitation, and a lot of grief, too, even if we’re sure it’s the right choice for our family. And while this is a normal part of the weaning process, weaning for the wrong reasons can exasperate these feelings and make them even more difficult to navigate.
So what are the “right reasons” to nightwean? They’re going to be different for each family, and sometimes even different for individual children within the family. It can be useful to take some time to reflect on whether you’re ready to make a change before making any nightweaning decisions.
How to know if you’re ready to start nightweaning.
Pay attention to how you’re feeling when you’re nursing at night. If you’re finding yourself feeling angry, resentful, or annoyed, it might be okay for your nighttime nursing journey to end here. Our children feel everything we feel and the last thing we want something as intimate as nursing to convey to our child is, “I can’t stand this anymore!”
Notice how it feels to think about reducing - or stopping altogether - your nighttime nursing sessions. Do you feel good about it? Would ending here actually feel okay to you? Would you like to keep some of your nursing sessions, but remove others?
Ask yourself how confident you feel in your child going longer stretches between feeds. Do you feel that they’ll still get their needs met without getting milk at night? Have they gone for a long stretch before and been okay with it?
Think about what else helps your child fall asleep when they wake. Maybe they have a special stuffed animal or lovey that soothes them, respond well to white noise or certain calming music, use a pacifier, or enjoy having their back rubbed. Does your child show signs of being able to fall asleep in other ways?
These are all good signs that yes, you might be reduce some - or all - of your nightnursing sessions!
How to know if you’re nightweaning for the wrong reasons.
There are also some signs that you might not be ready to make changes to your nighttime nursing just yet. Nightweaning usually involves holding boundaries and supporting some emotions, and this can feel especially hard if we’re holding boundaries we don’t actually believe in or want for ourselves. It’s important to remember that we need to go into this process feeling ready, rather than coerced.
Some things to pay attention to:
Notice if you’re feeling pressure to stop. This might come from friends, family, a pediatrician or even your dentist. You might be getting messaging from social media that makes you feel like you have to stop nursing at night, even if it’s actually working really well for you and your baby.
Similarly, notice if you’re being made to feel like it’s wrong to still be nursing at night. Is anyone telling you that it’s bad to continue night feeds, or that you’re creating a “bad habit”?
Are you worried that it could be impacting your child’s restorative sleep at night? As parents, we might not be getting the best sleep if we’re waking to support our little ones at night, especially if we can’t sleep through their nursing sessions like we potentially could when they were infants. But it’s different for our little ones. If they’re just rousing briefly and then going right back to sleep when they nurse, they’re basically “sleeping through.” A quick wake for comfort or a feed between sleep cycles is not detrimental to restorative sleep - in fact, we all have brief arousals through the night.
Have you been told that nighttime nursing causes tooth decay? While drinking formula out of a bottle past the one year mark could potentially cause some tooth decay, this isn’t the case with breastfeeding. When a child is nursing, the nipple rests at the soft palate and bypasses the teeth completely. What’s more, studies that have submerged baby teeth in breastmilk show that not only is there no damage to the teeth, but breastmilk might even have restorative properties for the tooth. If this is a reason you’re considering nightweaning, I wouldn’t let it influence your decision.
Some parents have been told that if they don’t stop nursing at night, their children will never learn to sleep through. However, this isn’t supported by the literature. In fact, there are a number of studies that show no notable difference in sleep patterns later in childhood between children who are nightweaned and those who are breastfed at night for an extended period of time.
Maybe you’ve been told that there’s no nutritional value to continuing to night nurse. Not only is comfort is a valid need too, breastmilk continues to be beneficial for as long as your breastfeeding relationship lasts. The body fine tunes its milk to meet a child’s needs over time, so if your little one is fighting off an illness or going through a growth spurt, your breastmilk will adapt at any age to meet your child’s changing needs.
Are you considering nightweaning because you’re going back to work or going away for a few nights? Many parents feel the pressure to nightwean because they’re going to be away from their little one for long periods during the day or overnight, but if continuing to nurse is important to you, most families are able to maintain their breastfeeding relationship despite these routine changes.
Reflecting on these can help you decide if now is the right time to reduce some - or all - of your nightnursing sessions. No one should be forced to continue nighttime nursing if it’s no longer working for them. But if nighttime nursing is working well for you and your baby. there is absolutely no need to stop!
Feeling ready to cut back on your night nursing? I’ve gotchu!
What makes my approach different:
The whole gist behind most sleep training programs is that you have to follow their rules for it to work… even if it feels awful.
That’s not what we do here. I will never ask you to do anything that goes against your intuition.
You’re the expert, and you get to call the shots.
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