Do dream feeds help with baby sleep?

'Dream feed' is a term used for feeding your baby milk in the evening or night (either by the breast or bottle) without fully waking your little one, in the hope that this will help you and your baby get more sleep.

I don't prescribe dream feeds as a solution to baby sleep problems. This is because dream feeds don't help with excessive night waking, and might actually cause problems.

Excessive night waking, or waking a lot between when you put your baby down in the evening and when you go to bed yourself, are signs that your baby's body clock settings are out of sync with yours, and need a reset.

When parents are advised to dream feed, or told dream feeds might help them get more sleep (which isn't accurate), there's a risk that desperately sleep-deprived parents will accidentally use some pressure to try to get milk into their baby during the dream feed. This can result, over time, in a conditioned dialling up with the breast or bottle, which makes everything worse.

Sometimes a breastfeeding woman whose baby dials up at the breast finds that the baby will only take the breast when he's sleepy. It's normal for parents to worry a great deal about their baby's milk intake if there are weight gain worries, and dream feeds might seem to help in the short-term, if you're in this situation. However, dream feeds

• Don't deal with the underlying breastfeeding crisis, which is the baby's conditioned dialling up with breastfeeds (quite often a result of positional instability, for example), and which requires the help of a health professional

• May worsen a conditioned dialling up at the breast in the medium to long-term, because babies are very sensitive to any pressure or coercion with feeds.

There might be evenings when you're about to go to bed and you have the feeling that your baby is likely to wake soon. You might decide to stir your little one and offer a feed in the hope of getting a decent block of sleep yourself before your baby next wakes up. By all means go with your intuition, experiment (without placing any pressure on the baby to feed), and see if this works!

But as a general rule, I avoid prescribing dream feeds and focus on all the other effective things you can do to make the evenings and nights workable - even enjoyable - for your family!