Baby’s Poor Eating And Sleeping Habits Go Hand In Hand
Does you baby have trouble sleeping and eating? It may be common than you think.
A new study published in the journal Pediatrics finds that parents who have problems getting their baby or toddler to sleep at night may also have trouble getting them to eat.
In a study of 681 healthy kids aged 6 months to 3 years old, researchers found that those whose child had behavioral insomnia were more likely to have eating issues as well.
Behavioral insomnia is a term used when a young child regularly resists bedtime or has trouble staying asleep. It accounts for up to 30 percent of children between the ages of 6 months and 3 years. Almost the same percentage also has eating issues. This can be anything from being an overly fussy eater to having a full-fledged feeding disorder. Feeding disorder happens when parents can’t get their child to follow a regular eating schedule or when the food refusal affects a child’s weight.
You might think that this is not really news, however, it’s the first time a study that suggest the link between the two has been published.
I personally relate to this. My daughter Katelyn was an extremely fussy eater as a baby. She would take a spoonful or two of food and then not want to eat anymore. I began to dread feeding her because often she would not want to eat anything at all. Sometimes, she’d fall asleep in her highchair only to wake up a few minutes later after she was in the crib. She’d wake up irritable and I figured she was still hungry so I’d try to feed her again, but by then she was too tired to eat and too cranky to sleep.
It was a drastic change from my older daughter Amanda, who would eat her meals without fuss and then take a nice two hour afternoon nap. It felt so peaceful and on most days, I could count on having regular free time in the afternoon. But feeding Katelyn, getting her to sleep and getting her to stay asleep was an absolute nightmare. Somewhere around age 3, she began to eat more and is the healthiest eater of the bunch right now at age 13. As for a sleeper, well if you screams from Brooklyn in the morning saying “Get up, you’re gonna be late!” that’s probably me. She still struggles with sleeping.
It would have helped me to know years ago that her sleeping and eating habits were related and not a product of something I was doing wrong.
So if you’re baby or toddler is having sleeping/eating issues, rest assured you may be doing all you can, as long as your pediatrician agrees that baby is healthy and thriving. As she get older, your baby may very well grow out of it too. The study doesn’t say exactly why this experience occurs or how to fix it, but it’s a start in understanding the correlation.
Image: Stockxchng
Interesting article, but I don’t understand this “So if you’re baby or toddler is having sleeping/eating issues, rest assured you are doing all you can, and they may very well grow out of it.” How do you know someone is “doing all they can”? Maybe they’re not and they just don’t know that they could or should be doing. Also the needs or sleeping and eating for a 6 month old are vastly different from that of a 3 year old. I hear people talking alot about how they can’t get their older toddlers/preschoolers to go to bed at night, and then come to find these kids are having naps. Well, duh, maybe they’re not tired by 7 or 8 if they’ve just woken up from a nap at 2 or 3 (or 4!) pm.
@Gretchen I think most of our readers are very well educated on parenting issues but sometimes despite all you do, and read about and research about, some babies just still don’t sleep and/or eat well. I say to these moms to take some of the pressure off yourself if you pediatrician agrees that your child is healthy and thriving. But you’re right, late naps do not help any sleeping situations.
In our case, although neither of our kids seems to need all that much sleep in general, our good sleeper is our poor eater and vice versa. My older child was a nightmare in the sleeping department for his first two years but is and was a good eater, both in terms of quantity and quality. My younger child slept through the night much, much earlier, but (as I have posted before) has never let a non-French-fried vegetable pass her lips voluntarily. So, anecdote not data, but if you’re reading this and you have a six month old, don’t draw too many conclusions from your child’s sleeping habits either way.
This article is an exact description of my son. He was very active and easily overstimulated as an infant and started having difficulty sleeping at 3 months old. He was exclusively breastfed until 6 months, but his growth slowed after that as he was very resistant to eating solids. He was walking by 6 months, but feeding and sleep were a nightmare. He was too energetic to eat until he was too tired to do so, and then he would sleep poorly, in part because he was hungry. We started bedsharing out of desperation when he was around 10 months old and his sleep gradually started to improve, and interestingly, around the age of 3 he also became a good, very healthy eater. I wonder if some kind of sensory oversensitivity maybe at the root of both difficulties?