Should I nurse my baby whenever he cries at night?
A baby is getting a bottle or being nursed because you want to give them food. I think the issue is: is do they need food or not? For example, if the baby is used to going to sleep either with a bottle or being breast-fed and they fall asleep while they're being nursed or fed with a bottle and then when they wake up spontaneously during the night they may very well, because it's a now a habit, they sleep under the association they may very well want to have the same again. Question is, are they hungry or not? Do they need it or not? That's what you have to ask yourself. So as a rule, from about six months you should be able to sleep though the night without needing food. You may wake up for whatever reason, but you shouldn't have to wake up because you're hungry. And I think it helps for mothers to understand that because I think instinctively when a baby is waking up at night your nature is "I want to nurture." and part of nurturing is feeding. So when a baby wakes up at night, your instinct is to say: "Well, I think my baby is hungry" and it requires a mom or a dad if he is doing feeding, to kind of be a little objective and to look at the situation and think do we have a hunger issue here, is the baby still young? Are they still waking up in the night because of hunger? Or is this the waking up because it's normal to wake up but they have a habit of going to sleep with a feed and fell asleep while they were feeding? And now this is what they want again. Not because they want the food, but they want to suck or they want the same experience that they had when they were falling asleep.
