Some people believe that putting cereal in baby bottles helps babies sleep through the night quicker. Is this a myth or does it actually work? Here are two parents – pro and con – and then experts share their thoughts.

"I am Chilean, and my family started advising I do this almost too soon – like 8 weeks of age – to get [my fraternal twin boys] to sleep through the night," says Celinda Appleby of Rockville, Md. At the time, Appleby felt the boys were too little and because she was having so much trouble getting them to latch and be breastfed 100 percent, she didn't want to add one more element to the mix.

The Peruvian nanny, however, started introducing cereal in the babies' bottles when the boys were 12 weeks old, and encouraged using cereal in all of the bottles. "She swore by the 'trick' of cereal in the bottle," Appleby says. "I tried it because I wanted to see if it would work in terms of them sleeping through the night. I had so many people advocating for this and my husband and I decided that we would give it a week to test it out. It really made a difference right away."

The nanny and other family members said the problem was the boys weren't eating enough, which is why they woke up at night. Around the time they started using rice cereal in their bottles, they were getting a dream feed at 11:30 p.m. to 12 a.m. after the 7:30 p.m. bottle, and this allowed them to sleep until 4:30 to 5 a.m. The nanny argued that the dream feed would disappear if the cereal was added, which held true almost immediately, Appleby says, so around the time they were 4 months old, they were given rice cereal with the last bottle (at 7:30 p.m. or so), and they slept until 7:30 a.m. They continued using rice cereal for a few months, and also breastfed, so they had a 50/50 combination of formula and breastmilk.

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