Our daughter has always been on the low end, sleep-needs-wise, but I’ve generally had her in a predictable schedule without problems getting her to sleep. She went straight from three naps to one nap at twelve months old. She will be 21 months in a couple of days.
Aaaaaaand…
She seems to have stopped needing or being able to take a nap. It’s slowly disintegrated over the last month. A month ago we would initiate bedtime at 7:30, she’d be asleep by 8, wake up at 7, and nap 12 - 1:30.
Then she began to resist falling asleep but eventually do it. Then she began waking up at ungodly early hours. And this week, she has only napped once. Here are the two scenarios that seem workable:
She wakes up around 7 (which happens practically no matter what) and does not nap. She gets cranky around 5, but we keep her up till bedtime procedures are initiated at about 6 or 6:30. She then gets a long night’s sleep. Note: we have not put her to bed this early yet, but if she does not nap, the sleep she gets overnight with her usual 7:30 bedtime is not sufficient.
She wakes up around 7. She falls asleep for a nap somewhere between 2 and 3, and sleeps less than an hour. She then cannot fall asleep until after 8:30 at night, so bedtime procedures would need to be initiated about then. This leaves me no adult time with my husband due to our different sleep schedules.
She doesn’t seem afraid of being in her crib in the dark unless she’s been awake there for a long time. If she has been awake for a long time–say on a day she’s had a nap and a regular bedtime–she can get upset enough to keep herself awake, and she’ll fall asleep the minute I go in there and rock her.
Can you give me any advice? I really miss naptime, but evening time with my husband is more important, and option #1 seems likely to get her more net sleep every 24 hours.
My son gave up has early too, and it was a stone cold bummer. I’d say option 1, with no nap, is the best course. Maybe you can shoehorn in some kind of “quiet time” around 3 or 4, with her laying on the couch watching some TV, if only to give you a chance to take a break.
It may change again, with her hitting a growth spurt and needing a nap again a few months down the road.
Keep her up and stretch out the day over time. She’ll get drowsy around dinner time at first and you’ll have to keep her occupied so she doesn’t drift off, but after a few weeks she’ll figure out the new schedule and be fine. It sucks, but it’s normal. I agree that a regular quiet time in the middle of the day is a good idea. Give her some books or a few favorite toys and let her amuse herself for an hour or so.
Remember when they’re really tiny and the advice is to sleep when the baby sleeps? Wasn’t that just the best advice ever? Yep, this is the flip side of it
Honestly, what I did was keep both scenarios in mind, and wing it on a daily basis.
There were days that a nap was obviously needed. So I would try to ensure it happened early enough. There were days that an early night was important, so I would put a lot of effort into skipping nap. And there were days when I miscalculated completely and she fell asleep for a late nap at 5 pm. Those nights sucked.
Make the most of the nights when the schedule works out with DH. And let the other ones go. It can be a long transition to give up naps completely, but it won’t last forever.
My son gave up naps completely at 13 months, and that point would sleep about 11 hours at night, with very few sleep problems throughout his childhood (he’s 14 now).
Some people are just more extreme in their need/lack of need for sleep than others. My husband doesn’t need much sleep either. It’s a bummer for parents, but before you know it this stage will be over too.
I have been careful to never say this to my son, but I read somewhere that studies show that people with extreme sleep patterns (cat-nappers, non-sleepers, long sleepers) tend to be among the most intelligent and/or creative members of society. I dunno if that’s true, though both my husband and son are intellectually gifted so perhaps there is a kernel of truth to it. Anyway, it’s a comforting thought - I recommend you take it, and don’t examine it too deeply for flaws. That’s how I survived that exhausting stage where your kid has zero sense, excellent mobility, and insatiable curiosity
Thanks everybody. The “sleep when the baby sleeps” advice was BS from the beginning… as a newborn she’d regularly be awake 14 hours at a stretch, with 20 minute catnaps. She didn’t nap longer than 45 minutes till she was six months old.
I’m glad there’s no strong opposition to the no-nap schedule. I really hope that with longer nights she’ll handle it well. And CairoCarol, there’s been no doubt from the beginning that she was a smart cookie
We had to deal with daycare that had an enforced nap schedule and a little girl who didn’t need naps. They would put her down and if she wasn’t quiet within 20 minutes, she’d move to the preschool room where naps were optional until the other toddlers woke up. Somedays she slept, somedays she didn’t last the twenty minutes before she was enough of a disruptive force for the nappers that they sent her away. Sometimes she didn’t sleep but was content to lay quietly with a book or just daydream.
Usually we just have our daughter lay down for 30 minutes whether she falls asleep or not. I don’t mind if she plays with her toes the entire time or chats with her animals, but we do enforce some amount of quiet time to make it possible for her to sleep if she needs to. If she sleeps, awesome - she’ll usually sleep for a couple of hours. If she doesn’t, that’s fine, too - if a half hour has lapsed and she can’t sleep, she can get up. One way or the other, my husband and I could usually use a break. My six year old son can make as much noise as he likes downstairs where there are a ton of toys.
At preschool they do the same thing - if the kids sleep, great; if they don’t, they lay down for a half hour and read until the other kids are awake.
When my son hit this stage, I found that putting on a CD and telling him he needed to play quietly in his room until the CD stopped helped a lot. He could nap if he wanted, color if he wanted, “read” if he wanted…totally his choice, as long as it was quiet and in his room. And I didn’t try to bullshit him: “Mommy needs a rest. You don’t have to sleep, but you have to let Mommy rest until your CD is over. Thank you!” The best part about using a CD as the timekeeper is that if he *did *fall asleep, he didn’t know his time was up. When he woke up and heard silence, he’d assume the CD just ended!
My daughter (12 years later) didn’t cotton much to the CD ploy, but she liked her timer a lot. So she’d “help” me set the timer for 45 minutes and know that she was expected to quietly entertain herself until it went off. Did you know that you can get timers that advance in 5 minute increments with a quick flick of a thumb, and that toddlers don’t grok two digit numbers all that well? Some of Mommy’s Rests were maybe a little longer than 45 minutes.
She’s still in a crib, so plain old quiet time in her room has that logistical difficulty. So far, if I’ve read her stories and cuddled her ahead of time, and turn the Twilight Turtle on before I go, she’ll be peaceful in her crib with her dolly until the turtle goes off (45 minutes). Putting books in her crib with her pisses her right off.
My older son gave up his nap around age 2, just before my younger son was born (gee, thanks). I would sometimes use the “quiet time in your crib/room” thing with him, with mixed results.
My younger son is 3.5. He gave up a regular nap a while back, but he still sometimes needs one, and will fall asleep in the car or his stroller in the early or mid-afternoon. I will let him sleep about an hour, then wake him up. If he naps too long, he’ll have a hard time going to bed at night. Many days he doesn’t nap, and is sometimes miserable before bedtime. Every once in a while, if he is extremely cranky around “nap time,” I will ask both him and his brother to lie in their beds for a few minutes. They share a room. The younger one will inevitably fall asleep, and after 10-15 minutes I’ll fetch the older one out.
