‘Best sleep hack for kids’: TikTok parents are claiming that butter helps babies sleep better

A TikTok trend claims giving your baby a tablespoon or two of butter before bed will help them sleep better at night.

“What if I told you my toddler was still waking up every 2 hours at almost 2 years old until I started giving her real grass fed butter before bed,” reads one TikTok post by creator @bridgette_.gray. Since then, her child has experienced “a week straight of sleeping almost 8 hours every night.”

Another TikTok user @abbyexplainsitall calls butter (importantly, not margarine) the “best sleep hack for kids” and she lets hers eat “as much as they want.” The video currently has 279.8K views. In the caption she adds, “The fats help keep them satiated and that helps with sleeping! My kids sleep from 6:30pm – 6:30am and still take amazing naps throughout the day.” 

But experts are pumping the brakes on the trend.

According to pediatric consultant Niamh Lynch, there is actually no scientific evidence that giving babies butter before bed makes them sleep longer.

“Unfortunately butter is not going to make babies sleep better,” she said in a video posted to Instagram. “It might upset their tummy. It might cause diarrhoea. It’s a choking hazard obviously to give them a big chunk of butter. So, park the butter idea.” Instead she suggests a list of foods that do actually help with sleep, including kiwi, cherries, milk, fatty fish, nuts, and rice (although beware of allergies).

Giving babies any solid food before they are around 6 months old is also not recommended. From about 6 months old, babies can begin to be offered nutritious solid foods. Even then, butter is not the best option as it is high in salt and saturated fat, which are not recommended in large amounts. 

Butter is not the only sleep-hack tried and tested by desperate parents. It was once thought that adding cereal in a bottle of milk before bedtime would also help babies sleep through the night (research found this did not increase sleep in the slightest). More recently, the viral lime hack, where parents cut a lime in half, place it in a dish, and position it next to their child’s bed for better sleep, has been doing the rounds online.  

The truth is, it is perfectly normal for babies to wake during the night. Not even a stick of Kerrygold or half a lime can come to parents’ rescue.

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