Is your baby (< 6 months) with sleep problems hungry and needing to start solids?

If your baby is waking excessively in the night, it's most likely because of disrupted body clock settings, not hunger

If your baby's body clock settings are disrupted, he will look for a feed each time he wakes in the night. He isn't waking excessively because he has developed a bad habit of wanting to feed, as you might sometimes hear!

• A baby who is breastfeeding for long periods in the night without settling back to sleep (and who is otherwise tracking well on her growth chart percentile line) is excessively wakeful because her circadian clock is out of sync with yours, not because of the breastfeeding.

• If your baby is bottle fed and no longer settles back to sleep after a feed in the night (and who is otherwise tracking well on his growth chart percentile line) then he is excessively wakeful because his circadian clock is out of sync with yours, not because he has developed a bad habit with the bottle.

There is no evidence to suggest that your baby will sleep better if you start solids earlier than five or six months. You can find out when to start solids here, and how to start solids here.

When your baby is a newborn, or when your baby is in the first couple of months of life, hunger can result in excessive night waking, whether breastfed or bottle fed. Your baby's weight gain, in this case, isn't following her percentile line on the World Health Organisation's growth charts. Please discuss this with your GP or midwife.

Breast milk is not a weaker form of food

A breastfeeding baby in the first six months of life won't sleep better with solid food in her tummy. Breast milk is a powerful and nourishing whole food, rich in satiating fats. Breast milk isn't 'weaker' or lower in caloric value than other kinds of nutrition, including solids.

Your baby feeds not just for milk but for sensory motor nourishment too

We can think of our baby's biological drive for milk as having two parts,

1. The need for calories and nutrition

2. The need for rich sensory motor nourishment.

It's best not to try to separate out these two when we're thinking about breastfeeds. The same is true if your baby bottle feeds. You can find out about paced bottle feeding, if you're not direct breastfeeding, here.

If you offer milk frequently and flexibly throughout the day, to keep your little one dialled down, you can trust your baby to take the milk she needs over a 24-hour period. She may be at the breast for only a short time, for example, or she may not take much milk at all some feeds. This is normal.

Breastfeeding is a source of very rich sensory motor nourishment because breastfeeding (or any body contact with feeding, whatever methods you use to feed milk to your baby) offers

• The sensory experiences of your warmth, your scent, your body or skin, your heartbeat, the vibrations or sound of your voice and breath

• The enfolding and deeply comforting touch and pressure experiences of physical contact with you

• Direct sensory feedback to her motor initiatives, as your body and your hands interact with her movements, both big and little, which reinforces her biological drive to continue with motor explorations

• The biological downregulation of her nervous system which results from sucking.

Sometimes baby's need for sensory nourishment comes to the fore in the night, other times it's hunger. But we don't need to worry about which it is - a quick offer of the breast will send her, and you, back to sleep. You can't overfeed her with breast milk!

If you aren't able to use breast milk with your little one who is in the first months of life, you can find out about the benefits of paced bottle feeding and how to do it here.

You can find out why it's important never to pressure our little one's around milk or food intake here.

Recommended resources

Is your baby (6 months +) with sleep problems hungry and needing more solids?

Do breastfed babies have daytime sleep problems because of hunger?

About conditioned dialling up, and how to prevent it, if possible

Selected references

Borowitz SM. First bites - why, when, and what solid foods to feed infants. Frontiers in Pediatrics. 2021;9:654171.

Dalrymple RA. Earlier introduction of solid food is associated with improved sleep in infants. Archives of Disease in Childhood Education and Practice. 2020;1015(4):251-252.

Perkin MR, Bahnson HT, Logan K, Marrs T, Radulovic S, Craven J, et al. Association of early introduction of solids with infant sleep: a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial. Jama Pediatrics. 2018;172(8):e180739.

Felder JN, Lee K. Association of early introduction of solids with infant sleep. JAMA Pediatrics. 2019;173(2):194.