How to go from feeding to sleep to falling asleep in the cot

What the heck are sleep associations? 🤔

Basically, our brains are designed to recognise patterns. Constant patterns allow our brains to flick thing over to our subconscious mind, which basically means we don’t have to think about it anymore, it’s just a pattern that runs. Think driving a car or riding a bike.

Sleep associations are things or behaviours that are around you enough times at sleep time that your brain now connects it with falling asleep. Think your bed, your pillows and your blanket.

Now let’s talk about how this looks for kids:

There are two different types of sleep associations: independent and dependent.

Independent associations are things that don’t need our input e.g sleeping bags, comforters, white noise. Dependent associations are things that do require our input, think feeding, rocking, cuddling, patting.

Every human wakes up around 4-5 times a night, between sleep cycles. Most of the time, we partially wake, check everything is still all good and then go back to sleep.

If something is not all good, we wake all the way up. This could look like a full nappy, hungry, cold, uncomfortable, scared etc.

However, it could also look like there was a boob in my mouth when I fell asleep and now there is not. For some children who are sensitive to their sleep environment and have attached safety to these associations, this can trigger a danger signal because their environment is not as it was, and they really rely on that movement, touch, milk etc to feel safe enough to fall asleep. So they wake all the way up and scream their heads off until that sleep association is present again - because they genuinely believe there’s danger.

This is all well and good, but they can become REALLY unsustainable when your child is waking up every 45 minutes for the boob all night long. 

At this point, I would argue that feeding to sleep is not working at all.

So, how do we shift them?

Option 1 - Habit stacking

This is a great method if you have time up your sleeve and you'd like to take things slow.

Step 1 - Put your child to sleep in the same way you usually would (e.g. feeding/rocking/cuddling etc) and also pat their bum and sing to them. This allows their brain to connect being fed AND patted AND sung to with the act of falling asleep.

Step 2 - Start pulling them off the breast/stop rocking when they're still awake and patting/singing to them to put them the rest of the way to sleep

Step 3 - Place them into the cot/onto a bed and pat/sing them to sleep while laying or sitting next to them

Step 4 - Stop patting before they're all the way asleep.

Voila - your child now falls asleep in their cot.

Option 2 - Straight into the cot

This one is a good option if your child is more chill, you're absolutely ruined or you'd just like to get this over with. Your babe is likely to not love this at first, but it works much quicker than habit stacking does.

In terms of the "how to" you can try something like Gradual Withdrawal or Pick Up Put Down to settle them. These are all googleable! 

*Note I don't use these methods exactly as they're set out, but they're a great sleep training option if you're not in a position to afford paid help.

Option 3 - Call in the troops

A really great way to change a really strong feed to sleep association is to call the other parent in. This can work quite well for some kids, as they know they can't get a feed off dad!

It's quite common that your babe will get pretty upset at this prospect, however as long as they're being responded to by someone who loves them - they'll be totally okay!

At the end of the day, if the way you're putting your baby to sleep is working for you and them, there's no reason to change it. However, if you're finding you're seeing every hour of the night and everyone is miserable, these are some options.

Steph xx