Due to a chaotic toddler, it has been many months since my partner and I have had more than two consecutive nights of solid sleep. Given research that suggests just two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, we are positively decrepit.
New parents face up to six years of sleep deprivation – a depressing statistic to consider when your infant has woken up for the millionth time overnight. No wonder we look, as Chappell Roan has put it, like we don’t have light in our eyes. Bone-tired parents can get desperate enough to try anything: $2,000 app-controlled self-rocking bassinets, sleep courses sold by influencers with questionable credentials – even, as a disconcerting number of TikToks suggest, spoon-feeding babies chunks of butter.
Why are people feeding their babies butter?
TikTok and Instagram abound with videos of chipper mothers giving their obliging children globs of the stuff before bed, with some touting butter as the trick that finally put an end to night waking.
“I can totally see why parents would be taken in by it,” says Dr Nina Jane Chad, a research fellow at the University of Sydney and an infant and young child feeding consultant for the World Health Organization. But butter is unlikely to make a baby sleep through the night, “and there could be some harms involved” for young infants, she says.
“There certainly isn’t any scientific evidence that a big dose of butter or fats or calories is likely to help with night-time sleep,” agrees Dr Fallon Cook, a paediatric sleep practitioner and director of Infant Sleep Australia. “If sleep happens to be better that night, it’s probably a coincidence.”
Research suggests that what an infant eats during the day does not affect how likely they are to wake overnight. Other foods that were once touted as beneficial to baby sleep, like rice cereal, have also been found not to have any effect on sleeping through.
Feeding butter to babies six months and under – for whom exclusive breastfeeding is recommended by the WHO – is “going to change their gut flora and make them much more susceptible to whatever infectious diseases are doing the rounds”, Chad says.
From six months, infants require an iron-rich, nutritious solid diet in addition to milk. “They need to have some animal-source foods, they need to have fruit and veg daily. They need to have whole grains and they need to have calcium-rich foods as well,” Chad says.
“Saturated fats is not such a huge issue for kids – we recommend that they have full cream dairy products,” she says. But she describes butter as “an energy-dense but nutrient-poor food. There are better choices in terms of your child’s whole diet.”
What is ‘normal’ baby sleep?
“In the first six months, it’s very normal for babies to be waking multiple times overnight. They’re often needing to feed to meet calorie needs, and it just takes time for sleep to consolidate into longer stretches overnight,” Cook says. “As we move past six months … we start to see some longer stretches of sleep emerging.”
According to Chad, “Most babies will be waking at least once and usually up to three times up until their first birthday, and about a third of children are still waking at least once by the time they turn three.”
Though night wakes naturally decline with age, “we have this idea that babies and young children, should sleep for eight or 10 hours a night [in one stretch],” Chad says. “They don’t.”
Though sleep “regressions”, such as the so-called four-month regression, are dreaded by parents, there isn’t much evidence to support their existence. “There aren’t predictable times where sleep always goes bad,” Cook says. “What we know is that for every baby, there will be natural ups and downs with their sleep, and it’s not time-locked.”
Just regular bad sleep, or a sleep problem?
“From about six months of age, children can develop sleep disorders,” Cook says. Some are physiological, such as snoring and breathing difficulties. Others, known as behavioural sleep problems, occur where a baby or toddler has “rather specific conditions that they need met in order to fall asleep” – for example, being bounced on a fit ball, driven around in a car, or a very strong feed-to-sleep association.
“Some of these things every now and then are completely normal. But if it’s at a point where it’s exhausting parents and an older baby or toddler is needing these unusual conditions, six, seven, 10 times per night, that’s when … it could be impacting sleep health, and probably impacting parent mental health.”
While Cook encourages parents not to ignore serious difficulties, she says that “when it comes to baby sleep, we will always say that parents know best”.
“If a baby’s waking up a lot at night, but a parent feels fine about that … and they’re managing, then there’s not a problem.”
I am desperate for my baby to sleep better. What do I do?
Parents in the trenches wish for nothing more than a quick fix for better sleep. Unfortunately, Cook says “There’s no magical combination of things that you can do … it really comes down to consistency.”
A regular bedtime routine “gives your child’s brain a cue that sleep is coming”, while she advises parents having issues with settling their child to “break it down into really little, manageable steps”, such as introducing cues such as gentle pats or humming which can be done whether the child is rocked to sleep or settled in their cot.
Whether or not to sleep train a baby is – like Donald Trump and Vegemite – a topic that seems to invite polarised opinions. Sleep training encompasses various behavioural strategies ranging from implementing a night-time routine to “crying it out”. One study, which looked at the effect of controlled crying, found that sleep-training didn’t reduce the frequency of waking but did seem to decrease parents’ perceptions of how often waking occurred.
Research shows that “there are multiple ways of settling a baby in a cot, and they are safe”, Cook says. “We don’t want parents using an approach that they feel devastated about or traumatised by.”
Donna Lu is an assistant news editor at Guardian Australia and the sleep-deprived mother of a one-year-old
Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims
