11 Month Old - Should I Still Night Feed?

You can try a twilight feed before you go to bed. If that is 10:30 or 11 get baby from crib and with the lights dim offer the bottle. It will likely draw down some despite being asleep. It will get baby to wake later.

Best
F. B.

I think it is unreasonable to expect an 11 month old to go more than 8 hours without food.

I'd try to shift him to a sleep schedule that works better for you because the problem is not that your baby doesn't sleep well, the problem is that his sleep schedule doesn't align with yours. My advice - keep him up a little later so that he can have his bedtime snack later. So, if you give him his last bottle at 8:30PM and then maybe he'll make it until 5:30AM, which is not an unreasonable hour to start your day.

Also, make sure he's really full before bed. When my oldest was close to age 1, he slept better and longer if I gave him a big bowl of oatmeal cereal before bed, in addition to nursing.
(I'm talking after 9 months old - I don't want a mom of a 4 month old to think that I'm suggesting solid foods will make a very young baby sleep through the night - no! This response is for babies close to age 1.)

Your plan to take away formula may be premature. You've seen what the lesser amounts at the 7pm bottle is doing, so I think you need to revert back to the amount that was working well before.

For weaning off formula, you have to be able to replace that nutrition with a variety of solid foods in enough quantity that he is not getting hungry in the middle of the night. It seems like he may not be at that point yet, so you should plan to keep having formula around for a few more months.

As the poster below said, his bedtime isn't working out with your preferred sleep schedule. He isn't going to sleep longer when he's hungry, so adjust his bedtime so that he's waking up when you're okay with being up for the day and having breakfast.

He is waking up because he is hungry and probably wet. Feed him the correct amount of formula in a bottle and do not water it down. Your son sleeps a total of a solid 8 hours a night. That's great for a child that age.

If you are going to change up his food at 1 year make sure he has a good meal before he goes down for the night. Don't be afraid to change up and try other things until you two hit a stride that works. But then it will change again.

Perhaps a later bed time could make for a later morning.

Your sleeping in and routine have to change and become flexible throughout your child's life. Gone are your sleeping in days until they are in their teens. Take a nap when he takes a nap to keep up your energy.

the other S.

That is going 9 hours without eating, so yes it it understandable he wakes hungry. I would try giving the last feeding late - when you go to bed and then 8 hours later will be daytime. When DS was that age, we simply put him to bed when we went to bed and did his last feeding at that time.

I didn't feed my babies at night, but I never put them to bed at 7:00pm. I fed them at 10:00pm right before I put them to bed and they slept until 7:00am. I think that 12 hours might be too long between feedings. I would aim for a later bedtime.

he's not even a year old. some people get lucky and get sleep-through-the-nighters early on, but most tiny people can't go for 12 hours without refueling.
i wouldn't look at this age OR one more short month as some sort of cut-off point. i think you're exactly right- he's awake because he's hungry.
you've already won the lottery- you've got a good baby who falls asleep easily and self-soothes, so why try to 'train' him not to be hungry?
it's only once in the night.
feed your hungry baby.
khairete
S.

You will get a lot of variation in the responses to this I am sure. All I can do is tell you what my Ped told me from the start, that after the first couple of months babies no longer need to night feed but continue to wake and eat at night because we train them to but giving them food every time they do. Because, at 11 months, this is more then likely a learned behavior it can be unlearned, but it will take time and commitment. The first few nights may not go well, but once you start you have to stick to it or he will just learn that if he holds out long enough he will get what he wants. That said "through the night" is not the same for a baby as an adult, I used to put my boys down at 830 for bed and they would wake up at around 530, I would feed them at that point and they would often go back to sleep for a couple more hours. So if he is sleeping from 7-430 that would be "through the night" and you may simply want to consider moving bedtime back a bit.

Best of luck.

So do you feed him when he wakes up at 3:30-4:00 a.m.? And when you say you tried lessening the amount of formula you give him each night, you're talking about the 7 p.m. feeding? Just trying to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying.

I would feed him as much as he'll eat before you put him down at 7 p.m.

I do that with my 12 month old who drinks milk (as much as he wants) before he goes down at 7:30 p.m. and he is able to go through the night without feeding until 6-6:30 a.m. My daughter also did that when she was around that age. It's worked well for me.

Hi J.,

I see you've had a great deal of input, so I'll be brief. He's still an infant and, as such, should still be fed on demand. I get what your saying about lessening the amount in the early am feeding but don't really agree that this will create a solution. It's been years for me since I had to do a bottle feeding every night but I remember how challenging it was. He's hungry and growing leaps and bounds and that's why he asking for that bottle.

Do you have a significant other that you can trade off with every other night? My DH and I did this and boy did it make a difference.

I was always told you can never be responsive enough to an infant (0 to 12 months) so keep letting him drive for a little longer, until he's a little bigger and you can start to take over the proverbial wheel, slowly but surely. :-)!! S.

J. - neither of my boys could go 12 hours without eating at that age. My oldest was 20 months before he could go that long - he got up for a bottle every night at 2:30am after going to bed about 7pm. He would then go back down until 6 or so. My baby, who is now 5, was over 2 before he could make it through without eating. It sounds as if your baby goes back to sleep after the 3:30 bottle? If you do too, then what is the problem?

People who say that their children sleep all night are exaggerating or flat out lying. Hang in there, eventually they do sleep though.

i read a few other responses. and others have given great advice. please continue to feed your child. whenever they need food.
you can up the protein content of the bedtime feed and that could help baby last longer before needing another feed.

Hang in there...it does get better and better :) I would feed as much as possible at bedtime. Let him drink all he wants to keep him through the night. I would try to ensure to feed him regularly throughout the day as well to keep him on schedule. Good luck

I had one who kept waking at night until a year.
My only suggestion would be to up the food during the day and even offer him extra food (such as cereal) as a snack before bed. See if that makes any difference. If he stops waking, then you know it was from being hungry.
I would also check to make sure he's not waking from being cold. We had one who would. Our climate is chilly and at night he got chilled and woke enough to find it hard to go back. He'd wake a bit during night but if got cold enough, he would be quite awake, and then want a bottle.
A friend of mine gave bottle of water. Eventually her baby just lost interest.
Good luck :)

His formula has a LOT of his needed nutrients. Unless he's on straight up table food and not baby food. Baby food has about zero nutrients. It's only to teach infants to chew and swallow.

The baby food companies expect babies to have formula first before they eat baby food.

So if you're feeding your child baby food they are likely starving for nutrients and a bottle at 7pm is NOT going to last for more than 12 hours. Okay? Not trying to be mean but your baby needs formula and food. If they aren't eating anything after 7pm they need to eat every 3-4 hours.

EVEN IN CHILD CARE KIDS ARE REQUIRED TO BE OFFERED FOOD EVERY 3-4 HOURS.

Kids need to eat. 7pm-when you are ready to wake up for your day....let's assume that's 7am. That's 12 hours you expect an 11 month old infant to go without food. That's way too long. I know a lot of people say their babies sleep all night and that's nice for them but I don't think all that many babies do that.

We always put our kids down around 9pm and gave them a full snack before bed, including complex carbs, protein, and a drink. They got a bottle too or at least formula in a cup.

They went to bed with a full tummy and slept until about 7:30 the next morning. For the most part anyway. I do have one that would wake up regardless around 4 or 5 and meander back and forth banging one wall the another as he made his way towards our room.Once he was in bed with us he was out the rest of the night. If we let him start out in our room he slept all night almost every night.

All in all I think your baby is starving and that's why he's waking up so hungry. Too many hours without food or formula and if you feed him more food, not baby food, and give him as much formula as he'll take then he'll sleep longer. Maybe don't put him down at 7. That's really early. Don't you get to spend any time with him in the evenings?

One thing you should consider.

All my experience with variety care for kids comes from years and years of child care. So I refer to what happens in child care a lot. Not trying to tell you your child should be in child care of anything. Okay?

In child care we put the kiddo up into the toddler room and they do not get a bottle. They move towards a tippy cup when they are in the baby/infant room. They also start sleeping on cots and lots more. They also start weaning off formula. They also don't eat a lot of baby food, they start eating table food that is chopped very finely.

SO the babies are getting table food, formula, as they start weaning them off formula they mix the ratio.

The first week the mix 1/4 bottle, 2 ounces of whole vitamin D milk. If there are any problems at this stage you might need to see if the baby is allergic to milk.

Then if that works well and the baby is able to digest it without problems then they start half milk and half formula. That is sometimes a hard one. The milk can cause the baby to have a lot of gas, diarrhea, constipation, and upset tummy. Sometimes it can take a week or a week and a half of this mix to get their tummy calmed down. Then they go to 6 ounces milk to 2 ounces formula. Once they start this mix this one should go quickly.

So get your baby off formula in the next month, feed them table food and not baby food, perhaps let them go to bed later so they aren't doing without food for so many hours, then see how that works.