I am sure you have heard this before: “If You Feed Your Baby Every 4 Hours, They Will Learn How To Sleep Better.” 

This comes from the idea that babies only wake up due to hunger and making sure they are ‘not just feeding for comfort’, will make them sleep better.

There are a couple of reasons why people might think why this would work is

• The baby is feeding for comfort, and this is unnecessary.

• The baby must be taught to only feed when they are actually hungry.

If the baby is actually waking up hungry, then feeding them less isn’t simply going to work. They will initially just cry for the whole time until they get fed.  (Yes this will stop at some point, they will give up on crying – they will give up letting you know their needs). When it comes to feeding your baby, they are going to be exhausted from crying, and they might not even finish their feed. They will ‘crash out’, their cortisol levels (stress hormone) will be very high and they will most probably struggle to stay asleep past their first sleep cycle.

If they not hungry and feeding for comfort, then we will need to figure out other ways to comfort them, because the need for comfort isn’t just going to go away if we start feeding them every 4 hours.

Yes, you could ignore their need, but that might not be such a good idea later on. This is why:

Some babies have a very small appetite and if you feed them less often, you risk them not being able to get enough calories during a 24h period. You are risking them getting dehydrated and getting sick very quickly.

If the baby is bottle-fed this might stretch their tummies, which might impact their appetite regulations later on.

If the baby is breastfed, this strategy is risky because it assumes that:

• The breast always makes the same amount of milk each time, which they DON’T.

• You can control how much milk a baby drinks in one feed, which you CAN’T.

• The mother can store larger amounts of milk necessary for less frequent feeds, which is not always possible.