Night weaning

I'm Emma Pickett and I'm a lactation consultant from London. When I first started calling myself "Makes Milk" that was my superpower at the time because I was breastfeeding my own two children and now I'm helping families on their journey. I want your feeding journey to work for you from the very beginning to the very end and I'm big on making sure parents get support at the end too. Join me for conversations on how breastfeeding is amazing and also sometimes really, really hard. We'll look honestly and openly at that process of making milk and of course breastfeeding and chestfeeding are a lot more than just making milk. Lots of families don't ever night-win. Their child naturally extends their intervals between feeds at night and wonder they sleep through and the next day they sleep through again or it might be that the child is waking up but honestly no one really minds. They just feed and quickly go back to sleep and the feeding parent may not even fully wake up and if regular night waking is not causing anyone distress it does not mean that anything has to change. When it comes to sleep I will often be signposting to Lindsay Huckway. She's a sleep expert, she's an IBCRC and she reminds us that culturally we often hear this message that young children are supposed to sleep from 7pm to 7am but as she says not all children sleep like this and actually she uses this phrase culturally incompetent. It's a culturally incompetent idea to assume that all children or all adults for that matter have this big block of undisturbed sleep. Some people believe that they have to start night-wining because their child is waking and they assume that that is causing them harm and they're assuming that they have to change that because their child is supposed to have this big block of sleep. And Lindsay says we just need to check that we're actually not projecting. We might be tired, we might be exhausted, we might be struggling with waking but quite often our toddler is not. Fragmented sleep is not the same thing as sleep deprivation. Now if parents do want to night-wine because they want to improve their own sleep fair enough but night-wining does not necessarily improve your sleep because your little person may still wake up and still need help to get back to sleep and you don't have the magic tool of breastfeeding anymore you're going to have to develop other co-regulation techniques. Night-wining is not something that guarantees your child is suddenly going to start to sleep through. It is really very normal for a little person to still need some assistance at night and you're going to need to be up-skilled in doing that. And it's important to think that through because breastfeeding at night, it's basically the equivalent of giving your child some sedatives. I mean oxytocin and colicistokinina, there are literally sedatives in breast milk that help your child get back to sleep and you actually benefit from the oxytocin that helps you get back to sleep as well. So you could be in a situation where without those sedatives it is taking your child a little bit longer to get back to sleep. So if you are absolutely in crisis mode when it comes to your own sleep, night-wining is not something you can do easily in response to a crisis. That process of night-wining will initially take more effort and energy. And if a parent feels like they're in crisis, ideally they're going to get support from other adults to help them get to a place where they then can review the situation neutrally and maybe then have the capacity to start night-wining if it still felt that's what they need to do. So if someone is going to go ahead with night-wining, what are some of the approaches? So if it's a younger baby, you're going to be substituting the breast for a bottle. They are still going to be needing to be fed, but that's not going to be the recommendation for a toddler because we're not ideally using bottles beyond 12 months. That's the NHS recommendation. But also, to be honest, the desire to breastfeed at night is very often not about the milk itself anyway. It's very often about that emotional connection using you as a co-regulation tool and your breast being the magic way that helps and feel connected and safe and loved and then helps and feels safe enough to go back into the next deep cycle. Sometimes we do need to consider food and liquids a bit. Some toddlers will get thirsty at night. They may not eat as massive amount of solids in the day and their overnight calories may be a significant portion of their intake. We might need to have a cup of water on hand. We might need to do a little bit of a juggle around nighttime versus daytime solids. We might need to realign that day night calorie balance. But for most older nurslings, we are starting with an assumption that we're really talking about the breast as a method to transition between sleep cycles. It's not really about milk. It's about how their body knows to move from one sleep cycle to the next sleep cycle. It is their co-regulation tool of first choice. I mean, why not? It tastes great. It's loving and wonderful. It feels safe. It's what they've always been used to. You can see why they might choose that. Now that doesn't mean they're going to be thrilled about losing it. A parent has a right to make changes around the breast feeding pattern and a nircelling has a right to their feelings too. Now parents sometimes contact me and say they really want to wean gently. And what that is often code for is I don't want my child to be sad. I mean, fair enough, wouldn't that be the dream? I mean, of course, we would love to have a little button that switches off our child's attachment to breast feeding and our child's love for breast feeding. But that would mean weaning when your child really wouldn't mind and you're not in that place in most cases. If you're in that place, your child would actually be on a self-weaning journey and just about to self-wean anyway. So if your child is not choosing to voluntarily embrace feeding, there is probably going to be some sadness. Now that can be really tough as parents because we are hardwired to not put ourselves first. That's really going to mean those guilt buttons being pushed. But that doesn't mean that sometimes we still have to we shouldn't move forward if we need to. We still do sometimes have to move forward. So that sadness may not be avoidable. Our children may still be angry and sad and we're going to be there to accept their feelings and support them through them. How quickly can that process of night weaning happen? So different opinions around this. You will find an article online by Dr. J. Gordon called Sleep Changing Patterns in the Family Bed. And in that article, by the way, he assumes that co-sleeping as a natural state of affairs, he suggests that a parent chooses a core of seven hours of sleep, for example, 11pm to 6am. And this is the time when you're going to try and change the patterns in the family bed. By the way, he doesn't suggest doing this under 18 months. So for the first three nights, if a child wakes before 11, before those core hours, nothing changes, they can just breastfeed back to sleep as usual. But if they wait within those core hours, a parent will initially breastfeed but then leave the child awake and settle them to sleep using another method. So Dr. Gordon says, you know, expect them to be angry, expect them to be sad, but if they're in the arms of a loving adult, that doesn't mean they're going to come to harm. So the nursing has to learn to fall asleep without breastfeeding. Then he suggests that for the second set of three nights, when they wake in those core hours, you're not breastfeeding at all. You are just settling them back to sleep without the breastfeed. And then as the days go on, you continue settling them back to sleep without a breastfeed and gradually start winding down how heavy the core regulation techniques are and how much intervention you're giving them. Now that method is pretty stark. It can be valuable if a parent is really at breaking point and they don't have a partner or a support network. And actually, I guess one of the things I really do appreciate about this article is Dr. James Gordon, who very much comes from attachment parenting background, is giving permission to parents to care for themselves. And for lots of parents who found this article, the relief is not so much from the methods described, but from that sense of, I am allowed to do this. This is a doctor who's passionate about children's needs and co-sleeping and attachment parenting and he says, I'm allowed to do this. But in reality, parents may choose to go slower rather than having three days and then three days. And there can be some barriers to this method within some families. So some nursing will fall back to sleep so quickly on the breast that the parent literally does not have time to remove them in order to settle them in another way. Or sometimes the parents fall asleep super quickly as well. You've also got some issues around, you know, you've chosen those core hours. So for child weeks at 10.55, they can breastfeed back to sleep, but they can't at 11.03 pm. And I think for some children in consistent messages can leave them feeling a bit confused and can make weaning tough. With an older nursing, you may be able to explicitly explain your approach and maybe even show the hours on a clock and explain what's happening. If a child has never experienced any limits around breastfeeding, they may get quite a shock to the system. So you might want to start with putting some boundaries in in the day, even if you're not fully day weaning and your aim is just to night wean. Having some boundaries, the concept of boobies sometimes being tired or mummies tired or boobies need to rest, it can be a little bit easier to first introduce limits at a time when you're awake, you're conscious and you can provide some emotional support rather than starting in the middle of the night, which can be a difficult time for everybody. So, during those first three nights with the Gordon method, it is quite an ask for a child to fall asleep without the breast if all they've ever known is falling asleep on the breast. You know, that's the one habit that worked well, they loved it, and now it's gone and we're literally asking them to do something they may not physically know how to do. Plus the person who's done this to them is offering hugs and cuddles and they may feel quite angry towards that person and not really in a mood for a cuddle. So we may need to slow things down a bit and actually take a bit more time to learn other associations, other co-regulation techniques and help the child feel safe to fall asleep in different ways. I mentioned Lindsay Hookway earlier, Lindsay Hookway talks a lot about habit stacking. So we're going to stack some other habits on top of that breastfeeding to create that safe association with other ways of falling asleep so when the breastfeeding does get snuck out. Those other familiar habits are there. We're not leaving a vacuum where a child literally doesn't know how to fall asleep. Now the habits you choose will be different for every family. Some children will be quite irritated by patting and stroking and that can actually wind them up. Some families do really well with stuff to do with voices. I find that often works well for children sort of two years plus so maybe a parent telling a story, telling a sleepy story. So it's not a story that's exciting and stimulating and adventurous, it's fairly gentle and it's fairly simple. The language may be quite repetitive. You might talk about it's time for sleeping and the animals are sleeping and let's fly on a cloud and watch all the animals falling asleep. You might do some gentle singing. You might have a white noise machine with ocean sounds. I quite like the idea of using your phone to record your voice so you might tell some of those sleepy stories and then have some recordings on your phone. So when it's 2 o'clock in the morning and you're like, I have not got the energy to tell another story, you can just hit a play button on your recording and listen to something you recorded previously. So for older nurslings that concept of using your voice as the actual tool to help them fall asleep almost like a guided meditation on my website which is Emma PickettBressfeedingSupport.com. On my resources page you'll find a bedtime meditation created for me by the lovely Nihanna Trust Godread. She's got a gorgeous voice and she's recorded a bedtime meditation for children who are no longer breastfeeding to sleep. It's a really lovely model. You might just use Nihanna's version of yourself. I've worked with parents who've done that and it's worked really well. You might use her bedtime meditation as a model for something that you create yourself. There's an audio file on my website that you can download. An older child. I want to actually want some input on what they could use for their new sleep habit. You might do some role play in the day time. Talk about how people fall asleep. How does Daddy fall asleep? How does your partner fall asleep? How does a friend fall asleep? Play bed times. Get some dollies and some teddies. They all have different ways to fall asleep. How can we help this Teddy fall asleep? This Teddy isn't going to have mummy milk at night anymore. What can we do to help them fall asleep? Yes, this Teddy might be feeling a bit angry and sad about not having mummy milk. How can we help them use role play to work through some of these emotions? Breastfeeding toddlers often haven't attached to a cuddly toy. Why would they? We were effectively their cuddly toy. But when you are thinking about night-winning, this can be a good time to introduce it for the first time. Again, give the child a bit of agency. Let them choose who their nighttime friend is going to be. The really valuable tool during the weaning process, if your night-winning is a floor bed. I really think that for many parents who have been co-sleeping and want to move to having a little bit more separation at night, the cot has probably run out of steam. The cot journey has probably sailed. I think sometimes parents imagine, "Oh, if I can get my child back into that cot, they won't be so close to me, they won't smell the milk. Maybe they'll ask to breastfeed less." But if a child has been used to co-sleeping, that additional physical separation is not really going to leave them with that sense of safety around nighttime, which is what you really, really want. You know, probably closeness is going to be needed. This is not the time for separation. This is actually the time to lean into that desire for closeness, even if it's not forever. If we insert a physical barrier of a cot alongside the removal of the breast, we're really potentially going to reinforce that feeling of loss and isolation. So floor beds are great. Floor beds mean that you have a chance to get some rest as well, and a floor bed is a chart as a place where you can gradually remove yourself if you want to, leaving the child in that sort of stable safe space. Before you night-wine, talking to your child is helpful. This is not something that comes out of the blue, but equally it's not something that you necessarily want weeks of preparation. Being gentle around weaning is not the same thing as being very, very slow. A young child is probably not going to have a very sophisticated sense of time and concepts like next month or even next week don't necessarily have a lot of meaning. So maybe it's something like in a few days that might be more helpful. So you probably want to start by talking about the abstract sense that night-weaning happens for everybody. It happens for the characters in poor patrol. It happens for Peppa Pig, it happens for that boy in the supermarket. It happens for your cousin who doesn't breastfeed anymore. It happens for children in these picture books that you're reading about. So not for them, we're not immediately focusing on them, but generally night-weaning happens. And then you want to start talking about their situation and the fact that night-weaning is happening for them. And that as I said probably is not more than just a few days notice for when the change is going to happen. So you're going to talk about the fact that boobies will be sleeping at night. It's going to be hard. You're going to be there to help them. You've been habits stacking for a while. So hopefully you've already built up some other associations and some other things that help them feel safe with all your sleep. Then the morning prior to the big night where you're going to try night-weaning, you want lots of reminders throughout the day. So you may have been using some picture books for a while during that phase where you're talking more abstractly. This is when the sun shines is a really popular one. It's a picture book. It's very simple, but it's a very basic concept that when it's dark, we don't breastfeed. Works really well in the UK in the summer time. Not so successful in the winter time when it's dark at 4pm. So you might want to have some kind of clock or device that shows symbols of day and night to indicate to your child when morning is and when night time is. What's important to emphasise is that the parent is going to be there to support the child wherever they're feeling. We're not implying that they need to be a good boy or try hard. We're not praising them for not being upset. All feelings are welcome. We're not going to praise a child who doesn't show distress. We want them to know that we're there for them, whatever they're feeling. You may decide not to move straight away to full night-weaning and to say, you know, breast-to-sleeping at night. You might potentially go through a transition where there may be only allowed two feeds at night or you might perhaps have a transition where they're only allowed shorter feeds at night, perhaps any count to 10 or count to 5 and then they've got to full-sleeping another way. Some children do better with that sort of partial night-weaning and just having a limited amount of feast. That's particularly works if they're older and they can understand that concept. But other children do do better with a clear message that there's no milk until morning. It's not like when you're winning a baby where you might drop one bottle, wait a few days, drop another bottle. That inconsistency for an older child can be a bit confusing. Why is it we can breastfeed at this time of night but not breastfeed at that time of night? So sometimes it's that consistency that is needed and if you do partially night-wean, you can get stuck in this negotiation mode. I often speak to parents who do feel their children manage better with full night-weaning, a long-lotside loving support after a phase of habit stacking, after lots of talking and preparation rather than removing feeds one by one. It's very much still gentle because it happens alongside emotional support but it's that consistency that gives that child that sense of emotional safety. Even if you've done all the prep, even if you've done the habit stacking, when you finally get to remove the breastfeeding, you may find that there are three or four difficult nights. So this is, as I said, why you're not night-weaning at Christ's point. This is when you're night-wing when you've got a bit more energy to be able to approach this. You might look at your working patterns, you might try and take some leave, you might work out. There's another adult that can support you during the day. No, those nights are going to be hard, not least because the parents are going to be tired but also you're going to get some feelings of guilt surfacing almost invariably. This is why it's really important that parents have spent some time reflecting on their own motivation and owning their decision about why they're weaning. So if your parent who starts night-weaning because you believe that your toddler will sleep better and you don't want your toddler to have a broken night, you are going to really waver at 3 a.m. when your toddler is doing anything but sleeping and is screaming and pleading with you. You've got to know in your heart why you are moving forward with weaning for yourself and not feel badly about that. That doesn't mean you can't change your mind. Something really isn't instinctively feeling right. If you really feel like you need to breastfeed your child despite all your best efforts of giving the message that you're going to be weaning, it's absolutely fair enough that you follow those instincts but that probably doesn't mean it's fair to then try again the next night because as I said, this is all about consistency. So if you needed to breastfeed off pleading and you needed to breastfeed them, I would probably suggest you wait a while potentially a few weeks before you go back to weaning again and spend some time really reflecting on the preparation and what else you can do to get yourself ready. You need to take some time to get to a place where you can be consistent. The worst situation to be in is a situation where your child gets extremely distressed, you try to hold out after 40 minutes you end up breastfeeding and they actually end up learning that you are going to breastfeed that that boundary is not being held and you are essentially reinforcing the message that if they scream loud enough the breastfeed is going to happen. So forgive yourself if that is the decision you have made to breastfeed in that moment but then don't expect your child the next night to believe that that boundary is going to be held you will need to do some rethinking before you go back to night meaning again. Sometimes when parents are really desperate they may be encouraged by other people to go away and leave their child culturally that is very common. Often older relatives say things like "oh you know just leave them that is what I did" "I left them for a night, I went away with my friends for the weekend, I left them with my in-laws" "it is a very accepted way to end night time breastfeeding or even attempt to wean entirely by leaving your child". This is not something I am a fan of, we will talk about this more next week but you literally cannot walk away from this difficult moment. You know it is very tempting, it is very appealing to imagine that you do not have to see your child in pain that another adult will take that burden but there are two main problems first of all it often does not work. The toddler is likely to be at the age where they have separation and trust issues and when they are finally reunited with you how do they want to repair that relationship that is being ruptured probably by more breastfeeding so they will literally leap on top of you and continue to breastfeed with a new level of enthusiasm and a fear of its loss so it could be after a few difficult nights you are not just back to square one, you are back to square minus five. Secondly the idea that we leave our children in that moment of weaning is really avoiding a conversation that needs to happen. You know it is ghosting our child essentially we cannot avoid that reality if we are going to be emotionally sensitive to them. Emotions have to be dealt with head on and the child needs you to demonstrate I am not leaving you. We are not going to be joined at the nipple anymore but I am here for you this is not a loss of me this is a loss of just one little aspect of our relationship. I am the person that knows you best I know how you are feeling and I am going to do my very best to support you through this loss for most children this is their first significant loss in their life. When the breastfeeding parent leaves the home the child is losing all of you even if there is another loving partner there to offer them support. For a child that is not separation that is desertion but this is not just about the child and how the child feels this is also about you too if you leave that home you are not learning how to parent without breastfeeding you are not upskilling yourself in co-regulation at night you are not practicing how to help your child settle back to sleep without breastfeeding. None of this is completely avoidable you have to steer into the skid that is a phrase that the psychotherapist philipopera uses you are going to have to confront this head on. If you want to put limits in place around breastfeeding your child is going to need your emotional support and this is a great opportunity for them to be supported by you through this loss. If you are tempted to do night-winning because sleep is a really difficult area for you as a family it may be valuable to just possibly take a moment to look at the whole sleep picture and that might mean talking to a professional sleep consultant that is not the same thing as a sleep trainer that is not the same thing as someone who is going to be teaching you to use extinction techniques or to leave your child alone you want somebody who understands normal sleep patterns and understands parent child attachment. So in the UK a good place to start is actually holistic sleep coaching. You can read more about their underpinning philosophy in Z-Hookway's books. In other countries you are going to need to look for professionals who understand the value of natural term breastfeeding and understand how little people build relationships with other people in a healthy attached way. You may need to do some investigation or get some local recommendations. It may be that naps need tweaking, it may be that bedtime needs tweaking, it may be that there is not enough sleep pressure at night and that is what is causing these additional wakings. Night-winning, not necessarily saw all those problems. So in the next episode we are going to talk more about daytime-winning. We are going to talk about full parent-led-winning when the child is a booby monster which is my shorthand for saying they are really not ready to embrace feeding at all but the parent is ready to embrace feeding. If your child is really far away from self-weaning and you really want to embrace feeding where do you even start? We will talk more about that in more detail next episode. Thank you for joining me today. You can find me on Instagram at Emma Pickett, IBCLC and on Twitter @MakesMilk. It would be lovely if you subscribed because that helps other people to know I exist and leaving a review would be great as well. Get in touch if you would like to join me to share your feeding or weaning journey or if you have any ideas for topics to include in the podcast. This podcast is produced by the lovely Emily Crossbeak Media.