If your baby regularly falls asleep while breastfeeding or having a bottle, there is a good chance that at some point somebody will tell you to stop.
Perhaps you have heard that feeding to sleep creates a “bad sleep association”. That your baby will become dependent on it. That every time they move between sleep cycles, they will look for exactly the same conditions they had when they fell asleep. Or that if you want longer stretches of sleep, you first need to teach your baby to fall asleep independently. It sounds logical. But the evidence is considerably more complicated than the usual feed to sleep → sleep association → night waking story suggests.
And before you take away something that may currently be one of the easiest ways to help your baby sleep, it is worth asking a much more basic question: Is feeding to sleep actually a problem for your family?
Milk and sleep are not separate worlds
Watch a young baby towards the end of a feed and the overlap between feeding and sleep becomes obvious. They may begin hungry and actively drinking. Gradually, their sucking changes. Their hands soften. Their body becomes heavier against you. Their eyes close. At what precise moment did eating end and settling begin? Often, there isn’t one.
For breastfed babies in particular, sucking is not only about transferring the maximum possible amount of milk in the shortest possible time. Nutritive and non-nutritive sucking can occur within the same breastfeed, while breastfeeding also provides closeness and opportunities for regulation and settling. The relationship between breastfeeding and sleep is sufficiently intertwined that anthropologists James McKenna and Lee Gettler proposed the term breastsleeping as a framework for considering breastfeeding and mother–infant sleep in proximity as interacting behaviours.¹
So when somebody tells a breastfeeding parent that their baby is “using you as a dummy”, I find the language particularly unhelpful. A dummy or pacifier was designed to give a baby something to suck. The breast was not designed as a substitute for a dummy. That doesn’t mean you have to breastfeed your baby to sleep. It simply means that a baby becoming sleepy while feeding is not, by itself, evidence that anything has gone wrong.
What about bottle-fed babies?
Bottle-fed babies can fall asleep while feeding too. Sucking, milk, warmth, closeness and being held can all be deeply settling experiences. Falling asleep in someone’s arms while drinking from a bottle does not mean a baby has failed to acquire a developmental sleep skill.
There is, however, an important difference between breast and bottle feeding. At the breast, sucking can shift from active milk transfer towards slower, non-nutritive sucking. With a bottle, continued sucking will usually continue to deliver milk. A baby who still wants to suck does not necessarily still want — or need — more milk. That is one reason responsive bottle-giving matters. Rather than encouraging your baby to finish a predetermined amount in the hope that a fuller stomach will produce a longer stretch of sleep, watch their hunger and satiety cues. UNICEF Baby Friendly guidance similarly recommends responsive bottle feeding rather than persuading babies to consume more milk than they want.²
If your baby has finished feeding but still wants help settling, there are other possibilities. They may want to suck, be held close, rocked, stroked or carried. Some babies like a dummy; others have absolutely no interest in one. The question does not have to be How do I stop my baby needing something? It can simply be: What does my baby seem to need right now?
But isn’t feeding to sleep a sleep association?
Yes. And that isn’t necessarily bad. Human brains learn associations. Adults have them too. You may associate sleep with darkness, your own pillow, a particular position, your partner beside you, reading for ten minutes or the sound of a fan. Babies can develop associations around sleep as well. A familiar song, a sleeping bag, your smell, rocking, walking, sucking, a dummy, a bottle, the breast or lying beside someone can all become familiar signals that sleep is coming.
So the myth is not that sleep associations exist. The important question is what we are justified in concluding from them.
In behavioural sleep literature, feeding, rocking, parental presence and other forms of active parental involvement have often been described as sleep-onset associations. Observational research has also found relationships between some of these practices and parent-reported night waking. For example, a classic study of 122 nine-month-old babies found that babies whose parents were routinely present when they fell asleep were reported to wake more frequently at night.³
That finding is real. But it does not establish the entire causal story that parents are so often given: I feed my baby to sleep → I have created a dependency → my baby wakes because the breast or bottle is missing → if I stop feeding to sleep, my baby will stop waking. Those are several different claims.
The study was observational. It found an association between parental presence at sleep onset and reported night waking; it could not establish the direction or mechanism of causation.³ Perhaps parental involvement contributes to the pattern for some babies. But it is also possible that babies who wake and signal more frequently naturally elicit more parental involvement. Temperament, feeding, development and many other factors may contribute too. Association is not the same as causation.
Babies who fall asleep independently wake too
This is another piece that often disappears from the sleep-association story. Videosomnographic studies — where researchers can observe babies during sleep rather than relying only on whether parents noticed a waking — have shown that most babies wake or arouse during the night, including babies whose parents have no idea that they woke.
What varies is what happens afterwards. Some babies wake and signal. Some wake quietly and return to sleep. Some need parental help. The same baby may behave differently at different ages and on different nights.
In one observational study, even at twelve months, around half of the babies typically required parental involvement to return to sleep after waking.⁴ Related longitudinal research supports a transactional picture in which infant characteristics and parental responses interact over time, rather than a simple one-way process in which parental behaviour creates the baby’s night-time behaviour.⁵
This gives us a distinction that I think is enormously useful: Waking, signalling and needing help to return to sleep are not the same event. If your baby wakes and wants to breastfeed, that tells us that breastfeeding helps them after they have woken. It does not, by itself, tell us why they woke. The same applies to a bottle, rocking, your arms or your hand on their back.
So will stopping feeding to sleep make my baby sleep longer?
Maybe. But I wouldn’t promise it. If feeding is an important part of how your baby returns to sleep after every waking, changing that pattern may change what happens during the night. Some families may find that another way of settling becomes easier to share between caregivers, or that some wakings become easier to manage differently.
But removing feeding at sleep onset does not remove all the other reasons a baby might wake. Babies wake because sleep itself contains arousals. They may wake to feed. They may be uncomfortable, ill, hot or cold. Sleep need and its distribution across 24 hours matter. Development changes. Circadian rhythms mature. Sometimes a baby is simply a baby who currently signals frequently when they wake.
This is why I am wary of beginning with: We need to break the feed-to-sleep association. I would rather begin with: What exactly isn’t working?
If feeding to sleep works, it can work
Imagine breastfeeding your baby at bedtime takes ten peaceful minutes. They relax, fall asleep, and you put them down or settle beside them. Perhaps they wake later, feed again and quickly return to sleep. You don’t dread bedtime. Your baby isn’t distressed. The arrangement is manageable. In that situation, I see no reason to dismantle feeding to sleep merely because somebody predicts that it might become a problem later.
Development does not require us to practise the final stage from the beginning. A baby who currently falls asleep through sucking and close contact may later settle with an embrace, a hand on their back or a story, and eventually need very little help at all. What your baby needs now does not tell us what they will need forever.
You do not need to stop something that is working beautifully because you are frightened that otherwise your baby will never learn to sleep.
And if feeding to sleep no longer works for you?
Then we have a completely different conversation. Maybe breastfeeding to sleep worked wonderfully for ten months, but now you would like your partner to be able to do bedtime too. Maybe your toddler stays attached to the breast for an hour every evening and you are touched out. Perhaps your baby wakes repeatedly and feeding is no longer the quick, easy route back to sleep that it once was.
Maybe feeding hurts. Or perhaps there is nothing objectively “wrong” with the arrangement at all. You simply don’t want to continue doing it this way. That is enough. You do not need to prove that feeding to sleep is developmentally harmful before you are allowed to want something different. Something can work brilliantly for months and then stop working for a family. That doesn’t mean introducing it was a mistake. It means babies develop, families change and your needs matter too.
Before changing the feeding, check whether feeding is really the problem
This is a step I would not skip. Suppose your baby takes an hour to fall asleep every night while breastfeeding. It would be easy to conclude that breastfeeding is the reason bedtime takes an hour. But what happens if your baby simply isn’t ready to sleep yet?
Sometimes changing bedtime timing, looking at daytime sleep, increasing opportunities for movement and outdoor time, or adjusting the rhythm of the day makes settling dramatically easier without changing feeding at all.
Likewise, if your baby suddenly begins waking much more frequently, I would not automatically blame feeding to sleep simply because it happens to be part of bedtime. A sudden change may deserve a broader look at health, feeding, development and the whole 24-hour sleep pattern.
Start with the problem you actually have, rather than the sleep habit somebody told you must be responsible for it.
How can I change feeding to sleep without leaving my baby to cry?
There is no requirement to move directly from feeding completely to sleep to putting your baby down fully awake and walking away. If you want to change the way your baby falls asleep, you can introduce another familiar route gradually while remaining responsive. That might mean another caregiver sometimes taking over settling. You might feed and then add cuddling, rocking, stroking, singing or lying together, so that feeding gradually becomes one part of a broader bedtime experience rather than the only possible route into sleep.
With an older baby or toddler, you may begin moving the feed slightly earlier in the bedtime routine. You might change only one sleep initially rather than every nap, bedtime and night waking at once. And sometimes the smallest useful change has nothing to do with removing feeding. Perhaps another caregiver handles the first waking so you get one longer stretch of sleep. Perhaps you continue feeding at bedtime but no longer want to feed at every waking. Perhaps bedtime feeding stays exactly as it is while you change something elsewhere in the night.
There is no prize for removing the maximum amount of support as quickly as possible. The goal is to find something more workable, not to prove that your baby can fall asleep without you.
A note about teeth and bottles
As babies become toddlers, feeding to sleep also intersects with oral health, and this deserves a little nuance.
Current paediatric dental guidance identifies frequent nocturnal bottle-feeding and frequent or on-demand nocturnal feeding beyond the first year among modifiable factors associated with early-childhood caries risk. Dental caries is multifactorial, so this does not mean that breastfeeding causes tooth decay or that every child who continues feeding at night will develop caries. Once teeth have erupted, however, oral hygiene, fluoride toothpaste, overall diet and the individual child’s caries risk deserve attention.⁶
Bottle feeding needs one additional distinction. Falling asleep while being held and having a bottle is not the same as going to bed with a bottle and repeatedly drinking from it through the night. Paediatric dental guidance advises against bedtime bottles containing anything other than water because prolonged and repeated exposure of teeth to milk or formula raises caries concerns.
If an older toddler loves falling asleep with milk, you don’t have to remove the closeness along with the milk. You can gradually move the drink earlier, brush teeth afterwards and keep the cuddling, singing, rocking or lying together.
Again, we are not trying to remove comfort. We are adapting how comfort is offered as your child develops.
So, is feeding to sleep a bad habit?
No. It is a way of feeding and settling that works extremely well for many babies and families. Your baby can form an association between feeding and sleep. That does not automatically mean feeding caused their night waking, damaged their ability to sleep independently or created a dependency that must be “broken”.
At the same time, you are not required to continue feeding to sleep simply because it is biologically understandable or because your baby likes it. If it works, it can work. If it doesn’t work anymore, you can change it. The question I would ask is not: Have I created a bad habit? It is: Is the way we are doing sleep still working for us?
And if the answer is no, we can start there.
References & further reading
- McKenna, J. J., & Gettler, L. T. (2016). There is no such thing as infant sleep, there is no such thing as breastfeeding, there is only breastsleeping. Acta Paediatrica, 105(1), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/apa.13161.
- UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative. (2024). Infant formula and responsive bottle feeding: A guide for parents.
- Adair, R., Bauchner, H., Philipp, B., Levenson, S., & Zuckerman, B. (1991). Night waking during infancy: Role of parental presence at bedtime. Pediatrics, 87(4), 500–504.
- Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Burnham, M. M., Gaylor, E. E., & Anders, T. F. (2001). Night waking, sleep-wake organization, and self-soothing in the first year of life. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 22(4), 226–233.
- Burnham, M. M., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Gaylor, E. E., & Anders, T. F. (2002). Nighttime sleep-wake patterns and self-soothing from birth to one year of age: A longitudinal intervention study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43(6), 713–725.
- American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. (Current policy). Policy on Early Childhood Caries (ECC): Classifications, Consequences, and Preventive Strategies; Policy on Dietary Recommendations for Infants, Children, and Adolescents.