A new mom wrote in asking how to help with sleeping training her four month old formula feeding baby. My answers in today’s new video.Opinions vary when it comes to babies and sleep training. Some argue that at a certain point, babies can “cry it out.” Others feed on demand. Here are my thoughts.

In my book, four months is way too early to talk about how to sleep train a baby. Rather, at this stage, what you want to do is establish a good feeding and sleeping schedule for your baby. If you follow this schedule, your baby will begin to sleep longer stints at night and you will begin to get some rest!

4 Month Old Formula Feeding Schedule

At four months, a baby who is formula feeding often will go up to four hours between feeds. Don’t let it go longer than this during the day. Your baby schedule might look something like this: 7-11-3-7. Then, you should do a late evening or “top off” feed. You say you are doing this at 9 p.m. Push it back to 10 p.m. or even better 11 p.m.  If you stick to this schedule, making sure that your baby is awake and full after each feed (and burped), then sooner or later, your baby will start sleeping from the top off through to the morning. Eventually, you will drop the top off feed. Then, your baby will sleep for up to twelve hours. At that point, you are in baby heaven.

Here is my my four month old formula feeding schedule. For more details and thoughts, check out my video.

Hope this helps and thanks for writing into CloudMom!

Melissa