Our newborn baby was on a 3-hour feeding schedule by week 2. By week 4 he was waking up only once per night to eat, going for 6-hour long stretches before and after. Every night at 9pm we would put him down in his crib, fully awake, and he would fall asleep by himself. By week 5 he was on a 4-hour feeding schedule during the day. By week 8 he was sleeping through the night, and eating only 4 meals a day, following the family rhythms.

Understanding Needs vs Habits

People ask us what our secret is. I’ve drawn inspiration from various books (see below), but there is one very simple way to summarize our parenting philosophy: the key is recognizing the difference between your baby’s needs and their habits.

How Habits Form

Right after birth, your newborn baby needs to eat every 2 hours. So you feed him every 2 hours. But as you keep feeding him every 2 hours, pretty soon that becomes a habit. Babies’ needs change extremely quickly. The need to eat every 2 hours may only last a couple of days. But habits also form quickly, and they can persist long after the need is gone. If you’re not paying attention, the need to eat every 2 hours transitions into a habit without you noticing. Unlike baby’s needs, habits last forever. Without conscious effort, a 2-hour feeding habit can last throughout your baby’s childhood, and maybe even into adulthood. Who doesn’t know a grownup who has to snack every couple of hours?

The longer a habit is reinforced, the stronger it takes hold. The more entrenched a habit is, the harder it is to tell the difference between a habit and a true need. The power of an entrenched habit is so strong that it is virtually indistinguishable from a true need. Getting rid of an entrenched habit is hard. It feels like ignoring one of your needs. This takes effort. Worse, it also takes commitment and dedication, because as you’re weaning your baby off the habit, you can’t tell whether you’re doing the right thing until you’re on the other side. Only then does it become clear that this was actually a habit, and not a need after all.

That is why it is crucial to constantly keep testing whether a baby’s needs are still truly needs. Babies’ needs are constantly changing, especially in the early days. If you don’t test them, you will be inadvertently converting their early needs into habits that will last much longer than necessary.

The sooner you realize that a need is no longer a need, the easier it is to phase it out.

Testing and Adapting

Keep looking for clues that a need is no longer a need. Does your baby eat less than usual at every feed, or at a particular time? Do they not cry for their bottle? Try extending from 2 to 3 hours. Expect it to be a little bit painful at first. Even if a need is gone, the habit is probably still there. Breaking a habit, even one that’s only a few days old, is always a little bit difficult. Stick with it for the day. If it doesn’t work today, try again in a couple days. Remind yourself that the longer you delay, the more painful it’s going to be when you eventually have to break the habit.

Avoiding Accidental Habits

It’s also very easy to accidentally introduce habits through your own actions, habits that were not true needs to begin with.

Imagine that a baby fusses a little bit one night. You worry about them and pick them up. They fall back asleep. The next night the same thing happens. And maybe the night after that. Now, the 4th night, or the 5th, or the 12th, you’re fed up with having to always wake up in the middle of the night, so when your baby fusses, you don’t get up. Guess what? It’s too late. You’ve already introduced the habit of “I cry, they pick me up”. Now your baby is not getting what they expect after they fuss, and they’re going to cry like a banshee because that habit is already entrenched. So you give in, and pick the baby up again. In doing so, you’re reinforcing the habit further. The longer you stick with this, the stronger the habit becomes. At this point, it’s easy to tell yourself that your baby needs to wake up in the middle of the night. That they need you to put them back to sleep. Easy mistake to make. Entrenched habits are so powerful that they are very hard to tell apart from true needs. But try reminding yourself that babies have very few essential needs.

If a fed, clean, and comfortable baby is crying at night, weigh your options carefully. In the moment, the easy thing to do is to intervene. But consider that by doing so, you’re risking gifting your future self a bad habit to get rid of. A quick solution today may have to be paid back tomorrow, in the form of an undesirable habit that has to be broken the hard way. This is why you hear about “sleep training” and how painful it can be. That is the pain of having to break a habit that has been reinforced for too long.

Using Habits Intentionally

I highly recommend thinking up-front about habits that you’d love your child to avoid, and consciously steer clear of them. For example, if you want your child to spend little or no time on screens, keep the screens in the house off when your child is awake. If you’re worried about developmental delays that could be caused by too much pacifier use, do not introduce the pacifier. Or if you do, do it consciously. Use it only as a last resort, and have an “exit plan” – a strategy for when and how to transition off of it.

Habits can also be used to your advantage. For example, we knew from the start we wanted our baby to be comfortable spending time outdoors in loud and crowded environments (we live in NYC). So we started daily afternoon walks on day one. While we were still in the hospital, we would go for strolls around the ward. After we got dismissed, we immediately started taking him on coffee runs, random walks around the neighborhood, and trips to pick up dinner. We knew we wanted our baby to sleep a lot at night, and less during the day. So from the day he was born we let him sleep in a dark and quiet room at night, and in bright and loud environments during the day. We knew we wanted to be able to go to restaurants with him. So we took him out to eat with us the day after we got home from the hospital.

Kids are most malleable in the early days, so any habit you introduce early will have the best chance of sticking. Again, it might be helpful to come up with a list of habits you wish your child to grow up with, and then find ways to introduce them as early as possible.

Needs vs Habits in Adults

Incidentally, being able to tell the difference between needs and habits is a good skill to have even for adulthood. Many of us go through life never questioning some habits we picked up along the way that may be doing us more harm than good. It’s good to experiment with what habits you can get rid of and be better off for it. Do you think you need coffee to wake up every morning? Try switching to tea, or try going without caffeine entirely. Do you think you need lots of carbs to survive? Try a keto diet. Do you think you need to eat every 3 hours? Try intermittent fasting. You might be surprised how some things you thought were essential for your happiness and wellbeing (needs) might just be entrenched habits that are doing more harm than good in the long run.

Key Takeaways

To sum up: stay on your toes and help your baby outgrow early childhood needs before they turn into habits. Be mindful about what bad habits you may be introducing accidentally, and be intentional about introducing good habits early.

Further Reading

If you want to learn more, here are some books that directly or indirectly influenced this article:

1. Bringing Up Bebé: This is full of examples of how French parents succeed by imprinting good habits as early as possible.
2. The Happiest Baby on the Block: Very clearly spells out the actual needs of babies under 3 months, so you don’t have to keep second-guessing yourself.
3. Don’t Shoot the Dog: Really drove the point home to me about the power of positive reinforcement and how it can backfire (especially with cats… but babies too).
4. The Power of Habit: This one likely influenced my mental models around habits in general.