My son has just turned 4 months old and has not as yet slept through the night. I stopped breast feeding 2 weeks ago as it seemed as though he fed more during the night and then hardly fed for more than 10 min's at a time during the day and I just couldn't break the cycle. Fortunately he has taken well to bottles but this hasn't made any difference.

For the past week or so his night time waking (at approx 3am) has consisted of a feed and then a battle of approx 2 hours to get him back to sleep. We are at our wits end. In the morning he wasn't very interested in his bottle so we are assuming that it is a habit and not hunger.

Last night we tried settling him with water and again it took him 2 hours to settle Should we persist with this method, is he too young to expect him to settle himself and go without milk?

Interestingly, I expected him to be starving hungry after only having had water but he still wasn't desperate for his feed at 7.30am and didn't even finish his bottle.

Please help, the tiredness is just getting too much.


A So sorry to hear you are having such difficult nights!

It sounds like your son is a hungry baby but he also still works on a 24 hour clock, his days and nights are pretty mixed up.

You could try to encourage day time sleeps as this will help him to settle more at night.

You could try to put him into his cot in the morning and afternoon and expect him to have an hour sleep each time.

Controlled crying is recommended after 6 months of age, so instead you could try to feed your son milk at 3am and see if this makes any difference because it does sound like he is hungry. He fed a lot in the night when you were breastfeeding so he will still need to feed at night for the moment.

You could try to offer an extra oz of milk at 7pm and 11pm feeds and see if he takes it. Alternatively if you are waking him for the 11pm feed you could try to miss that feed and see if he is hungrier when he wakes and therefore he will feed better at 3am

health visitor