[joonzgurl]

Around what age do you think is best to night wean?

If you are not there yet, when do you plan to try?

If you have night weaned already, how did it go and what did you do?

[Purrrrrrr]

I think it depends on the kid. Gabe was night weaned by 8 months. He started eating more solids during the day in addition to his nursing, so he just wasn't hungry at night. Friday was the first night in months he'd woken up hungry. He did it all by himself.

I think it helped that he stopped sleeping our room by about 6 1/2 months, so he couldn't smell me anymore and didn't wake up repeatedly. I also can't nurse lying down (I'd smother the poor guy!), so to nurse at night really woke the two of us up and he just wasn't down with that after a while.

[mgm78]

it really depends. DD night weaned around 22 months, i think she may have been ready closer to 18-20 but she never really ate a lot of food and i tried everything to fill her up before bed because i did not want to deny her nursing at night if i thought that she was really hungry.

Hmm, I really dont know because I have not "set" time as to when I will wean Drake. I kinda want HIM to decide. We will just have to see how things work out.

[alwayssmile]

I don't think there's a best age to night wean. Really depends on the kid.

We unintentionally night weaned around 10 months which is a month after Aiden moved over to his crib at night. He started mostly STTN at that point. He gets boob in the middle of the night maybe 1-2 times a month.

[Jule'sMomInOR]

I night weaned Juliana right at 20 months. I wanted to night wean at 18 months, but she was teething then so I decided to wait. I was pretty close to going it at the 17 month mark when I had some time off from work, but I chickened out because she was starting to get teeth and I wasn't sure if I could follow through since if there was a lot of crying.

Part of me thinks I should have gone ahead and done it at 17 months, but then again I'm not sure. I think the main reason why there was so very little crying at 20 months was because she could understand me and if thought it was logical that she and I needed to sleep at night so she should wait until morning.

I have recently posted about what I did, but essentially I just told her that we would stop having milk until the sun comes up and we read "Nursies When the Sun Shines". About 2 months earlier we had stopped nursing all the way to sleep and instead we'd nurse for 10 minutes until Violet stopped playing the bedtime music. This was actually harder to do than night-weaning. She cried for maybe 30 seconds with this and no more than 10 seconds with night weaning.

It is about 2 1/2 weeks after I night-weaned and she is now STTN about 50% of the time, waking up once the other 50%. I am STTN maybe 25% of the time.

[mamma_anna]

I let my girls decide when they were ready to night wean. I honestly can't remember what happened with Meg. I think it was around 15 - 18 months. She just gradually stopped waking up as often.
With Abbey, night nursing was the last to go. She was about 3 before we gave it up.
Kayla was completely weaned by 9 months. She was more of a biter than a nurser. when I would bring her into my bed at night for a few minutes of cuddling, I'd keep a blanket between us so she wouldn't try to bite. We had a few weeks of really rough nights but I felt like I had to do it. She was drawing blood with those little vampire teeth!
It helped I think that we never co-slept. The crib was right next to our bed but not side carried. (I didn't know you could do that.) So they couldn't smell me really and waking up to nurse was a bit more of an ordeal for both of us so we never had the marathon nursing sessions. I don't think any of my girls woke up more than 2 times a night by the time they were a year old.

[ashj_1218]

I dunno about ideal. I guess each kid has their own schedule/needs in this regard.

I am thinking around a year will be nice. If I can swing it. But I won't do anything drastic to make it happen though. It's a pipe dream that he will be sleeping more at night around a year

[laurhob]

Around what age do you think is best to night wean? I think each child is different. For us, we nightweaned at around 16 months, it really helped that I could sort of reason with him through the process. He understood the concepts of sleeping when its dark and waking up when its light in the morning, that was really helpful.


If you have night weaned already, how did it go and what did you do? He started to be better about putting himself back to sleep at night, he would do it about half the times that he woke. I figured it was a good time to nightwean especially because we hit a window where he wasn't teething. I started by picking a four hour window of no boobie time and slowly expanded it from there. For the final stretch I explained that we were going to wait to have milk in the morning, and we would know it was time for milk because it wouldn't be dark outside anymore. The other night he woke in the night and peaked out the window by our bed and said "nope" and went back to sleep