I recommend only getting rid of one night feeding at a time. I only tried these methods on healthy, non-premature babies.
- Extend the length of time in-between night feedings. When your baby first wakes up, go to your baby but do not feed them for an hour. You can rock them, hold them, give them a pacifier but do NOT feed them! After several nights, they will learn to sleep an extra hour. For example, your baby may be waking up every night at midnight. When your baby wakes up, you wait to feed the baby until 1 AM. After several nights (or a week or two), they will learn to sleep until 1 AM. Once the habit is established, you can extend another hour to 2 AM. Wait a week or two. Extend to 3 AM. Wait a week or two. You could conceivably do this until your baby sleeps until 6 AM (a more reasonable wake-up time).
- Remove feeding altogether. Go cold turkey. Your baby will cry it out until they fall back asleep. While not harmful for your baby, this is probably not the most popular method of weaning for smaller babies. For older babies and children (>6 months), this method may be required as the more gentle methods may not work as well (at least according to my reading on the subject).
- Gradually reduce the volume of milk at the feeding. Let’s say your baby is typically drinking 4oz of milk at a feeding. You initially reduce to 3 oz of milk when they wake up at night. You then wait a few days or more, then reduce to 2 oz, wait another few days or so, and reduce to 1 oz. Usually around 1 oz, the baby stops waking up anymore.
We combined methods 1 and 3. Initially we extended the time until 2 AM or 3 AM. At this point, we only had one nighttime feeding that we needed to remove (if you don’t count the dream feed). Then, we reduced the volume of the last feeding until they did not wake up anymore. Both of my kids slept through the night between 12 and 15 weeks old. This was great because I went back to work at around 12 weeks. This works well when combined with dream feeding (discussed in another post)!