Before I gave birth I imagined a halcyon future where my baby would take 2-hour naps all day during which I would blissfully spend exercising, assembling a Pinterest-worthy baby book, binge-watching Outlander.
You know, all the stuff you guys probably do all day.
So you can imagine my surprise when my first nugget was born, and instead of 2-hour naps, he would take super short naps. Worse? Those micro naps were hard to come by AND he was a huge crank for 20 minutes after those naps. So my entire day was spent trying to get him to nap, desperately wishing he wouldn’t immediately wake up from his nap, calming him down during his post-nap fuss, and generally obsessing over the fact that short crap naps had become the bane of my existence.
Sound familiar?
Short Naps: A Plague on Your House
Persistently short naps are common, frustrating, and exhausting because:
[list type=”checklist”]
- Short naps (and sleep deprivation) generally lead to more disrupted night sleep, which leads to short naps. It’s a vicious circle.
- You never get any breathing room during the day.
- Short naps = frequent naps = challenging to leave the house because it’s almost always “time for the next nap” = isolating.
- Short naps tends to result in a lot of sleep obsession (furiously tracking everything, looking for patterns, trying to recreate the magic juju of that one time he took a long nap, self-flagellation, etc.).
[/list]
Getting babies to take long naps is challenging which is why it’s unsurprising to hear some people come to the conclusion, “My baby must not need that much sleep!” Which while technically this could be true, it’s highly unlikely. So let’s assume your baby does in fact need sleep and focus instead on how much nap sleep they should be getting and how you can ensure they get it.
The Ideal Nap Duration
How long should naps actually be? It’s a hard question as never in the history of time has the medical community agreed on the ideal amount of sleep for children. And the reality is that there is huge variability in the actual amount of nap sleep kids are getting. According to Weissbluth the nap range for babies is wide, anywhere from 1.5 – 4.5 hours a day, shrinking just slightly to 0-2.5 hours per day by age 3.
But the problem inherent with any survey of infant sleep is that you’re simply capturing how much they actually sleep vs. how much they should sleep. So the low-end numbers in these ranges invariably include some pretty sleep-deprived kiddos whose parents are likely first-timers who have been convinced “babies will sleep when they’re tired” (not true BTW) and thus have 3 month olds who are awake all day long.
But I digress…so what is an appropriate amount of nap sleep aka how do you know if you have a short nap problem?
Babies are born with an undeveloped intrinsic sleep regulation system, so instead of structured “day and night” sleep, they sleep for random durations scattered somewhat evenly throughout the day. As a result, newborns naps range anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours so by definition, however long/short your newborn naps are, it’s totally normal. Despite the oft-quoted (and entirely terrible) advice to “keep them up during the day so they’ll sleep better at night” the reality is that this sleep maturation process is largely developmental and resolves without or despite your interventions by the time they are 2-4 months old. Exposing newborns to bright light when they’re awake during the day and keeping the lights very dim when they’re awake in the middle of the night may help (and certainly won’t hurt, although the research isn’t entirely clear).
However, for most babies older than 2-4 months, normal naps fall within the ranges of normal baby sleep outlined here. By approximately 4-5 months babies have a somewhat mature sleep cycle of about 50 minutes (this gradually lengthens to adult levels of 90-110 minutes by school age).
Thus anything over ~50 minutes is a pretty solid nap as they’re successfully getting through one complete sleep cycle. If they nap longer (1.5-2 hour naps are grand) that’s even better, but ~50 minutes is a respectable length. Unfortunately many of us are stuck with 20-40 minute naps (which occur when your child transitions out of slow-wave sleep) that are often amazingly predictable (ex. 32.5 minute duration). So for older babies, typically anything shorter than ~50 minutes is officially a “crap nap”.
Top 10 Causes Of and Solutions For Short Naps
As mentioned, occasional crap naps are an unavoidable part of life and are not something to worry about. However chronically short crappy naps are problematic and something you want to do what you reasonably can to improve. A strategy to lengthen short naps starts by identifying why your child takes short naps. Also it’s likely that there are multiple reasons your baby takes short naps, so there may be 2-4 issues from this list that are locking you into persistent crap naps.
[list type=”numlist”]
-
Sleep Association – Object Permanence Issues
If your baby is older than 4-6 months and isn’t falling asleep independently, the same sleep associations that leads to frequent night waking also leads to crap naps. This is by far the #1 reason babies take short naps.
-
Baby is Overtired or Undertired
When babies are overtired, their bodies produce excess cortisol (a stress hormone and stimulant so being awake too long between naps can result in a short or nonexistent naps. Alternatively, as babies get older the amount of time they can and need to be awake between naps gradually extends. This additional time is necessary to accrue sufficient sleep pressure so that they can successfully fall asleep.
-
Environmental Issues
This is rare because most parents are almost obsessively careful about ensuring that their child’s sleep environment is more luxurious than a Turkish Spa, but anything that might make your child uncomfortable (itchy jammies, ambient light, loud noise) could undermine nap duration.
-
Hunger
Also fairly rare, but some babies take short naps because they go to sleep almost hungry. The “eat play sleep” method frequently leads to hunger-induced short naps.
-
Maturation of Intrinsic Bioregulatory Processes
Here’s some fancy science talk you can drop at playgroup to impress the other parents with your mad sleep knowledge. Simply put, it just means your newborn baby hasn’t yet matured enough to nap longer. A 9-month-old who takes 20-minute nap has a nap problem. A newborn who takes 20-minute naps is “a regular newborn.”
-
Mirco Naps
The pressure to sleep (aka sleep drive) builds up while your child is awake so they can fall asleep and stay asleep at naptime and bedtime. Unfortunately, sleep pressure quickly dissipates when they get even a tiny bit of sleep, so a 5 minute catnap while nursing, in the car, etc. let’s all the sleep air out of your nap balloon.
-
Not Enough Soothing
The biological compulsion to sleep is very strong at night but relatively wimpy during the day. Thus it’s harder for babies to fall asleep at naptime which is why so many people feel their “baby fights naps.” And most babies would prefer to party with you anyway so fighting sleep seems like a winning strategy. However you can bolster the sleep drive at naptime by using layering on more soothing than you use (or need) at bedtime. For babies under 6 months this often includes some combination of swaddle, swing, white noise, and possibly a pacifier.
-
Inconsistency
Newborns are amazingly flexible and can often nap almost anywhere and under any circumstance. However as they get older (3+ months), they need to nap in the same place/environment throughout the day. Sure the occasional “on the go” nap is fine but consistency is like gardening: no matter how hard you try, bugs will eat all your tomatoes. No wait, wrong analogy. Consistency is like gardening: the more effort you put into it, the better your pumpkins grow.
-
Pre-nap routine
Newborns don’t need help to transition from play to sleep time, older babies do. By 3 months you’ll want to have a brief, consistent, soothing pre-nap routine that both signals to your child that “it’s time to sleep” and enables them to successfully transition from play-mode to sleep-mode.
-
It’s Habitual
What if you’ve got an older baby and have done all the right things and have a shiny gold star next to all the potential issues I’ve listed here and you’re still locked in on 32.5 minute naps? The answer is that your child may have simply habituated to a shorter nap duration. Which is a bit more challenging, but not impossible to remedy. However the answer is a bit long so let’s dig into it further below.
[/list]
Breaking the Short Nap Habit
Sleep Myth #573 – if you do all the right things, the result will be long consolidated and predictable naps.
If you are actually doing everything right (see list above) and there is no underlying medical issue (reflux, food allergies, etc.), you may still be stuck with crap naps. Babies are creatures of habit and so even after all the root causes of napletts have been removed, they can remain entrenched in their short nap sleep-wake cycle. And remember, the sleep drive for naps is relatively weak and (most assuredly) most babies would prefer to not be sleeping. So as soon as they slide out of the deep sleep phase their eyes POP and they’re calling for you to come get them.
There are two essential strategies to try to break out of this pattern:
Disrupt the Sleep Cycle
Usually the nap duration is military-precision predictable: you know exactly when your child is going to wake up. Which is helpful, because you’re going to set a timer for ~5-10 minutes prior to the time your child will be waking up. Wake them just slightly by jostling them while they’re still in the crib (not enough so that they’re standing there waiting for you to pick them up but enough so that you see a bit of eye fluttering). Often this will disrupt their sleep/wake pattern just enough so that they navigate back into deep sleep, thus extending the duration of the nap. Continue this pattern for 5-7 days, after which your child should have RE-habituated to the new longer nap sleep pattern and voila no more short naps for you.
People are often resistant to this strategy because they fear simply waking their child up resulting in even shorter naps. But it’s often extremely effective and, worst-case, if you do inadvertently wake them up fully, you’ve only shaved a few minutes off an already short nap so really, it’s not a big deal.
Bore to Sleep
Read a few chapters of my sleep book aloud, your child will quickly become bored and fall back to sleep. I KID.
It’s not easy to fall back to sleep after a short nap (even a micronap can relieve the sleep pressure) and even harder when the alternative to doing so is “play with you.”
[pullquote type=”2″ align=”center”]
“I would much rather nap than play with my most awesome parent,” – said no child ever. [/pullquote]
Sometimes you need to remove “play with you” from the list of options. So for 2 weeks, naptime is 1 hour. If they wake before 1 hour is up, you leave them to chill in the crib until 1 hour after the start of their nap. If they fall back to sleep – great! If not – OK naptime is over after 1 hour. Initially there will be some tears: this is new, they’re used to you coming to play, and won’t be happy about the change in plans. However if you stick with this for ~10 days, you’ll find most babies will get bored (the ideal sleep space is safe and dull) and with no viable alternative, will fall back to sleep.
“But elsewhere you say post-nap CIO is a bad idea, right?”
Right. And the reason is that you have to be doing all the right things for post-nap CIO (which we’re going to call Bore to Sleep) to work and 87.3% of people aren’t doing all the right things. Because doing all the right things is hard and frankly, a little confusing at times. But in this scenario (older, healthy baby, and naps have been otherwise perfected) Bore to Sleep may well be the right idea.
Short but Not Crappy Naps: The Exception to the Rule
Are naplettes always a problem? No! The last nap of the day is almost always short. Most babies should be awake for a long-ish period of time before bedtime as they need this longer stretch to accrue a significant enough sleep debt that they can fall asleep and stay asleep at night. So you don’t want your child taking a mammoth late nap as this interferes with the bedtime process. Typically the last nap of the day is short, ranging from 30-45 minutes for younger babies, dwindling to 10-20 minutes as they reach 6-9 months in age.
So that’s it, all the tools you need to go forth and vanquish the specter of short naps forever. Or at least until your child decides to stop napping altogether. Good luck and tally ho!
Tried the gentle rousing a few times she just straight woke up. There’s no gentle way to rouse a baby, they just become wake-up every time. And leaving her to be bored to sleep just means letting her cry and cry in her crib no matter how many times you try and comfort her or even just leave her alone until at the end of it, your heart breaks from her unhappiness and tears. No thanks. Wish you had some other methods to suggest.
I would modify this to say there is no gentle way to rouse YOUR baby. This actually works great for loads of kids.
I do have other methods which are covered in greater depth in the book. It might be worth checking out if you’re struggling with naps. Good luck!
It’s funny how this article describes my daughter’s short nap issues to a TEE! For a time, she would ALWAYS wake up at the 30 minute mark (exactly!) So I started going into her room at 25 minutes and noticed that she always started moving at 30 minutes and wake herself up. So I started to gently place my hand on her back at about this time, and as soon as she started moving, my hand held her still enough so that she didn’t wake herself up! And then she finished up a solid nap. I did this for a few weeks until she started making it through that 30 minute mark on her own. Maybe this technique could work for you too if that’s what’s happening for your baby!
Sonya, if you’re after gentle sleep advice, I’d recommend Sarah Ocwell-Smith. I stumbled across this lady’s page by mistake and I’m horrified. Encouraging desperate and sleep deprived parents to leave their babies to cry themselves to sleep is just awful. Babies do not have the ability to self soothe! There is no scientific basis to CIO. Please continue to comfort your baby – she’ll sleep when she’s developmentally ready x
Interesting Luiza because I don’t believe Sonya mentioned how old her baby is… And babies DO absolutely know how to self sooth. Experts (which I am assuming you are not) typically disagree on when exactly this occurs, but usually between 3 and 9 months. I am no expert either, but I do my research and I am at least kind enough not to bash anyone on their own website when they are just trying to help other mamas. We all need all the help and advice we can get. And we need to remember that every child is different and what may work for one child may not work for another. As mothers, we are all faced with the difficult and never ending task of knowing our children and trusting our own instincts on what is best for them. At the end of the day we just need to have some patience – with our children, ourselves and others.
Hi Alexis! I thought this article was great and interesting insight and as relate it to my 5 month old nanny kid.
Our son ( 12 months old) has a problem with habitual short naps. We tried your method with jostling him 10 minutes before waking up and had a great success. Now he sleeps for an hour. As he only naps once a day, would you recommend jostling him once more for another phase? Would that work?
I forgot to mention that it has only worked for two days in a row so far. Today is the third day and our question is whether we can jostle him twice today.
My son is 6 months old and is taking 3 naps a day. The first one happens 1 hour after he wakes and is always 45 minutes long. The second one takes place 2 hours later and can be 1.5- 2 hours with my help (going in and resettling after 1 sleep cycle, 45mins). The third nap is definitely longer than what this article suggests…it’s typically another 45 mins, sometimes longer so that he can get at least 3 hours of daytime sleep.
Is a long last nap of the day a contributor to poor night sleep?
There is always 2.5-3 hours of wake time between his last nap and bedtime.
Thank you! Love your book, love your website. I still don’t have a baby that wakes less than 10 times a night but I’m largely seeing that I’m the one who’s the problem (can’t maintain consistency when trying to remove his sleep associations). 🙁
Would love hear about what people do for their pre-nap routine!
Usually it’s fairly brief – diaper change, read a few books, sing a song or two, sleep sack, white noise, then boom into the crib.
Any tips when literally everything hasn’t worked? My 8-month old daughter still takes 30 minute naps, which is especially alarming since she is now resisting the third nap, so she is often only getting 11 hours of night-time sleep and 1 hour of day time sleep. She has a strict nap time routine, has been falling asleep independently since she was 4 months old, and all of her naps are in her crib (I have a shiny gold star next to all the most common solutions for short naps). I have been trying the disrupt the sleep cycle and the bore to sleep techniques for three weeks now with limited success (maybe once every three days I get a longer 1 hour nap).
My instinct at this point is that the only solution is waiting until she grows up a bit more and she will figure it out on her own (with me continuing to make sure the conditions for good napping are still met). Is there anything else left to try? Should I continue with disrupting the sleep cycle technique (which can work, but makes her nap times less relaxing for me)? Is “wait until she is older” a legitimate sleep technique to try?
PS I am obsessed with your blog, your book, and podcast. Thank you for all of your amazing resources!!
I’m at 10 months with the exact same issue! 11 hours at night. 1hr to 1.5 hours during the day. Nothing seems to work. Bedtime is often in meltdown because of crap naps. When will it end???
When will it end? Well kids stop napping between 3-5 years so we can definitively say it will end by then.
So let’s break it down – if your 8 month old is still taking 3 naps my first thought is – cut to 2 (extend wake times). Because even with super crappy naps she probably needs to be awake longer for these techniques to work which mean (you guessed it) no more 3rd nap.
At 10 months if a kiddo is napping 1.5 hours a day they may not NEED more sleep. They’re sleeping 12 – 12.5 a day which is normal. Some kids drop to 1 nap a day sooner than others so imagine a future where they sleep 1-1.5 hours for their 1 nap and sleep 11 hours at night. That’s… well that’s pretty great.
The challenge is there is a range of sleep needs and everything within the range is biologically normal. So you do all you CAN do to set your kiddo up for success and they’ll sleep how much they’re going to sleep. But at that point you’ve done all you can do right?
Thank you so much for the tip! We will hang in there and give that a try 🙂
We’ve tried EVERYTHING for nap training. Getting her to sleep is better doing it before she’s tired but that vicious 20 min wake is killing us all. And even the training to help her fall back asleep works for 20 more min.
I’ve never heard of the jostling but reading it I’m thinking wow that sounds so logical and might work! I’ve wondered how to break the habit in her body to wake up but it seemed impossible. I’m eager to try this and see if it helps.
All the other sites said 20 min naps are overtired which was the case but now it feels like her body is trained herself to do it.
Thank you so much!! I’m shocked I haven’t heard of that elsewhere but am so glad to have found it here it’s different, gentle and praying it’s just what we need.
And for the hanging out in the crib until time to wake up that was phenomenal for a toddler I nannied for she only cried 10 min for 2 nap times. after that if she woke up early she just rested or silently played. Resting time isn’t naps but still very important especially when she was trying to get rid of naps all together.
What do you do when they wake up close to the 50 min? Her naps were 20 min now extended to 40. That’s longer but not a full nap.
At 20 I could bounce her back to sleep now it’s full out fighting and screaming until next nap time. So do I accept the 40 min nap if she’s actually done and continue the attempt to disrupt sleep cycle (just started today) and work towards the 1.5-2 hour nap.
I’ve always wondered what to do when they wake up from a short nap nowhere tells you how long to try to soothe them back for.
I also care for another baby and the screaming wakes her and then they’re both tired and miserable. Correction were all tired and miserable.i feel like a failure when after an hour of trying to soothe her she’s still screaming I stop attempting the nap because by that point it feels pointless and we’ll literally be at it all day for weeks on end
She’s 6 mo old
Thanks
Thanks so much
My 8 week old has been doing these 30 minute naps, as you describe here! It’s awful. I’m trying the “disrupt the cycle” method but haven’t had success yet. Will keep trying. For the “bore to sleep” method, should I be letting him cry in there after he wakes up after half an hour? Even at this age?
Thanks for the great article. I am working to get my 3 month old over the 40 minute hump. When I rouse her, does anyone have a suggestion about what to do in regards to her paci? She still has it at 30 minutes, so when I rouse her, should I take it out to wake her, and then put it back in? Thank you!
We have a 10 week old. He’s our 3rd child and I’ve battled short naps with my older 2 who are now great sleepers at 4 years old and 18 months. With this one, it’s also becoming a nighttime challenge, as you noted about the vicious cycle. At nap, It seems like he wakes after about 40 minutes and then tries to get himself back to sleep but he becomes very restless. This restlessness especially happens at night, in particular the early morning. At those times in the early morning, I admit I have likely made things worse by doing too much for him. It may last for an hour where he’s appearing to sleep and only 5 minutes later begins to fuss and grunt and then suddenly again, he’s “asleep”. Or at nap he will fuss like he’s awake and by the time I get to his crib he’s quiet until it all happens again 5 minutes later. I say he appears to be sleeping because it’s not the deep sleep look. Instead his eyes may flutter, his breathing is heavy and inconsistent, and he may twitch. Do you have suggestions for this type of issue and is it restful sleep he is getting when this happens? Thank you
Jessica
I’m sorry to say I find your posts disheartening and discouraging. Not a good thing to read as I’m about to turn in for bed with a 5 month old who has “crap naps” we’re working on and waking every hour at night. Yes a lot of this is probably how he naps, he seems to take after me, but we’re trying a few different strategies which will take a while but I’m already having some success with. The no cry sleep solution book by Pantley is a great resource and well worth whatever it costs, even though I got my copy free from the library. I encourage everyone with sleep problems to read it. She explains why problems could be happening and helps you figure out your situation and offers a variety of solutions. Everything from the mindset of low stress, patience, and gradual change. I’ve been implementing changes for a week and a half and am alreay getting longer naps (not always linked but within 10 mins of waking) and baby sleeps for 2 hour sttetches at night. Since I EBF and I feel little guy is too young for CIO and other harsher methods this is working for us where we are at. If I had only read your posts I would have collapsed in tears, it leaves you feeling hopeless! I hope all the commentors will check out the No Cry sleep solution,(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071381392/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_KInsBb55YNJN0) it is a quick read half of it is about babies development which I skimmed cuz I’ve read about it on various other sites. It makes sense for us sleep deprived parents and gives you things to start with right away. Don’t lose hope!!
My baby is 3 months old (about 14 weeks) but was born 3 weeks early. Should I be adjusting for that? He takes short naps – 45 min at the most but often around 20-30 min. But I think I read that he’s too young to try disrupting the sleep? If he hasn’t gone through the sleep regression to longer sleep cycles what do you recommend? I start his nap routine when I see his cues but still sometimes feed/rock to sleep, which I feel like I should stop doing. At night he may sleep up to 9 hours for a long stretch but often it’s more like 5-7 and then short stretches/early naps. I feel like he’s in a transitional stage for sleep because he’s not quite a newborn but not quite older, so I don’t know if I should be working on more than bedtime and nap routines or what. HELP!
I have a chronic 30 min napper at 18 weeks old and am excited to try these techniques. Question about leaving him the crib for the entire hour, do I do timed checks and soothing if he wakes up and starts to cry for the remaining hour? Or do I simply let him CIO and not go into the room for the remaining hour?
Thank you
My 9.5 month old is and has almost always been consistently inconsistent, despite my strict consistency. I follow the same routine and wake times daily. I always base my first nap off when I want her to be up not when she actually wakes up. Wake up times are typically between 5:30am-7am. We have been trying to drop the 3rd nap for what feels like an eternity and I feel like we are constantly going to bed early because she never naps late enough to make it to a 7/7:30 bedtime. She typically takes 1 nap that is 1-1.5 hours and then the other nap is a Crap shoot. Sometimes it’s 35 minutes some times it’s 1.75 hours. She clearly can connect sleep cycles and I practice crib hour if she takes a crap nap but she rarely falls back to sleep. What works one day does not work the next and her wake ups are so inconsistent that even starting her first nap at the same time makes the rest of the day a struggle. She has been falling asleep independently since 2 months. What the heck do I do differently!?
Hi Alexis,
My second DD is just shy if 3 months
Previously she was napping on her own several times a day for 1 to 3 hours and some days 4 to 5 hours and she would wake up happy and alert for hours with no fuss or crying unless she was hungry.
Suddenly she is napping 10 to 30 minutes and we have no idea why. Getting her to sleep is a bear and when she’s finally down she is only down for a crap nap and then up and screaming or cranky for hours with more 10 to 20 minute naps throughout the day that never leave her rested.
What the heck is going on!!??
I’ve tried every trick in the book (yes your book) to get her to sleep and sleep longer but nothing (and I mean NOTHING) is working.
What do we do? Is this normal? A phase? Where did my happy no fuss baby go and how do I get her back?