03/12/2026
It’s been exactly 2 weeks since we weaned our 16 month old toddler off her night feed and stopped offering 4am milk feed.
Ever since she turned 12 months old, we’ve reduced her total milk intake to 16 oz per day. Up until 2 weeks ago, she drank 8oz of milk at 8pm before bed and another 8oz at 4am. She woke up in the middle of the night, crying, asking for milk, and would go back to sleep immediately after drinking.
I finally decided to stop offering milk during the middle of the night for a few reasons:
(1) Dental health concern — If your child falls asleep while drinking from a bottle, they may have milk pooling in their mouth and around their teeth when they go to sleep, which can cause tooth decay
(2) night feed is no longer a “necessity” — By age of 1, your baby is getting nutritional needs met with daytime meals and snacks, so they don’t need night feeds to get them through the night
(3) baby sleep disruption — the longer we wait to wean off her night feed, the more ingrained it will be. Waking up at 3-4am for milk already has become a habit that our toddler formed, which we wanted to break off of so that she will sleep through the night.
(4) adult sleep deprivation — well, she wasn’t feeding herself 🫤 which meant someone had to wake up to prep her milk at 3-4am.
So one day, I finally decided to put a hard stop. And this is how we did it:
(1) Day 1, as she was drinking her 8pm feed before bed, I told her we are going to say good bye to the milk till the morning. I made her say/wave good bye multiple times.
(2) she obviously woke up at 4am, crying, looking for milk. I gently reminded her how we said good bye to the milk and patted her back to sleep. She slept till the next morning and had a big breakfast.
(3) We repeated this for the whole week, and by day 8, she stopped waking up at all 🙂
