Precious little sleep, p.19
Precious Little Sleep, page 19
As a rule, however, 3-year-olds don’t want to do lots of things (wear shoes, share toys, eat anything that’s not a cracker). Don’t let them easily sway you on napping.
18-Month to 3-Year nap homework
Stay the course. Consistency, commitment, all that good stuff. Do that.
3- to 5-Year Naps
Some lucky parents will have kids who nap until the end of kindergarten, but most kids will be done with napping far before then. While having a child who doesn’t nap frees up your schedule, it also means you no longer get a midday breather. Most people (read: me) look back on the halcyon days of napping as a time filled with the golden glow of a Norman Rockwell painting.
3- to 5-Year nap homework
Make a toast to your departing naptime and wish it a fond farewell!
The Three Conventions of Nap Nirvana
When it comes to children, there are things you can and can’t control. Unsurprisingly, most of the things you care about fall in the “outside your control” bucket (such as how many hours their fingers spend in their nose, and what they do with the stuff they find in there). As a parent, you have to accept that you can’t entirely control napping. Kids can and will fight naps. Some days will be terrible nap days, even if you do “all the right things.”
And what are “all the right things”? When it comes to napping, you have three very potent and specific jobs that I’m calling the Conventions of Nap Nirvana:
Give your child as much age-appropriate soothing (a.k.a. Power Tools) as you can. Plunking your 4-week-old down awake in a crib with nothing more than happy thoughts and pixie dust is unlikely to work well. Neither is having your 14-month-old nap exclusively on your chest while you bounce on an exercise ball. The key term here is “age-appropriate.”
Use the same pre-nap routine for each nap of the day. It doesn’t need to be an elaborate 60-minute affair involving massage, a Turkish bath, interpretive dance, and a musical puppet show. But you need more of a transition from playtime than “Well, time for your nap—into the bed you go, my friend!”
Timing is everything. Try too early and your child won’t be tired, but will be justifiably annoyed with you. Wait too long and your cranky overtired baby will be unable to easily fall asleep, but there is nothing left for it but to press on like Shackleton.
Simple, right? Theoretically, it is.
Theoretically.
Let’s break them down into some specifics that will help get you from where you are (desperately short, hard-won, inconsistent naps) to where you want to be (nap nirvana).
Age-Appropriate Soothing
The biological compulsion to sleep is not nearly as strong at naptime as it is at bedtime. Plus, your baby wants to hang with you, because you are a delightful person to hang out with. So you need to gently convince your child to forgo your charming company for a while—but without the advantage of powerful biology.
The Baby Sleep Power Tools discussed in Chapter 5 are your allies in encouraging healthy naps. Many people are eager to quickly wean off the Power Tools as though you get a free Starbucks gift card by being the first on the block to have a child who can sleep without any soothing tools. As far as Starbucks and I are aware, this is not the case.
Your baby will, however, likely require more soothing at naptime than at bedtime. Don’t worry about being consistent between how your baby naps and how they sleep at night—it’s okay if naptime and bedtime aren’t the same. The Goddess of Consistency will not punish you for this!
Consistency
Nap consistency is like dog poop on the carpet: ignore it and your house will be an unpleasant place to hang out in. The Goddess of Consistency might overlook a few small insults during the night, but she will clobber you should you flout her at naptime.
What does “nap consistency” even mean?
Your child naps in the same location, with the same pre-nap routine, most of the time.
You take advantage of a single set of nap cues (white noise, swaddle, lovey, etc.) for all naps.
For older babies, you nap at the same(ish) time every day.
You don’t skip naps.
Being consistent is a drag. It requires that you organize your entire life around your child’s nap schedule, which can be inconvenient if not sometimes impossible.
You’ll be inclined to do what works instead. Or to nurse your child to sleep without any routine or additional soothing association. Or to have your baby nap in the stroller, while babywearing, or in the car, depending on where you and your older kiddos are off to for the day. Which is fine... on occasion. But beware the Goddess of Consistency: she holds a grudge and doesn’t take insult lightly.
Some days you will find yourself repeatedly writing “all work and no play” on the walls with a Sharpie. When that happens, it’s time to toss consistency and get out of the house. But if naps are the ever-loving bane of your existence, those days will be the exception to the rule.
Starting at about 2 months, you’ll want to have a consistent pre-nap routine. Generally, 10 to 15 minutes of quiet wind-down activity is plenty, but it will be a sequence of activities that you will do before all naps, all the time.
Most babies (and certainly most older kids) struggle with transitions. Being yanked from a game of “hide Cheerios in the couch” and getting plunked into a dark crib asks a lot of a 1-year-old. The pre-nap routine helps to create space for your child to successfully transition from play to sleep.
A regular dull, dark, safe place is another important foundation for nap success. Location becomes a powerful sleep cue as your child comes to understand the activities, sights, and sounds of their sleep place. As anybody who has ever attempted to travel with a baby will attest, most children struggle to nap in new places. Once they’re no longer newborns, napping at home will be crucial.
Fortunately, the Goddess of Consistency will abide the occasional small indignity. A good goal is to have your child nap in the same place, with the same routine, and sleep associations 80% of the time.
Timing Is Everything
Timing is crucial to nap success. This is one of the most frustrating elements to baby sleep, as it often feels like throwing darts at tiny balloons in a windstorm.
There is a persistent idea that there is a “magic sleep window” for naps: if you can hit it just right, your baby will easily drop off to sleep with nary a whisper, but miss the “magic sleep window” by a few scant minutes and you are screwed. And there is some truth to this, for two key reasons:
A baby who hasn’t been awake long enough won’t have accrued sufficient sleep drive to fall asleep.4
Babies who have been awake too long accrue a sleep debt, which has many negative impacts5 and, paradoxically, will make it challenging to fall asleep.
Many parents are frustrated by their inability to triangulate this magic window. But the issue is not that the parents are incompetent, it’s that babies are mysterious and the magic window is often an unknowable thing. And further, for some babies, even if the nap is timed perfectly, there is no “baby easily nods off to sleep” payoff.
So to be clear: timing is everything. It creates the foundation for a good nap, and ignoring it all but dooms you to nap failure. However, while nailing the ideal time for naps may result in stupendous naps for some babies, for other, more challenging tykes, it is simply the first step of many needed to get to nap utopia.
In an ideal scenario, you aim for this magic window by following Baby’s lead. When your baby starts to yawn, get fussy, and rub their eyes, when their eyes look unfocused, when they cease to make eye contact, etc., it’s time for nap. Following Baby’s lead, however, is rarely straightforward. Some babies don’t give good sleepy signs. Or they give sleepy signs when they’re already overtired, so that if you begin your 15-minute pre-nap ritual when your baby has started to become fussy and rub their eyes, it’s already too late.
If you’re finding this to be the case for your baby, instead of watching for cues, focus instead on how long they’ve been awake. In fact, I generally find wake time to be more straightforward and less error-prone than following cues.
The Wake-Time Method
The Wake-Time Method involves calculating the time your child should be taking a nap based on how long they’ve been awake to ensure:
that your child isn’t awake too long between naps;
that your child is awake long enough between naps to accrue sufficient sleep debt; and
that your nap schedule is flexible enough to comfortably accommodate a high degree of variability in nap duration.
The ideal wake-time duration will vary by baby, but the chart here provides some general guidelines.
Wake-Time Duration
Wake Time* Nap Duration Naps per Day
Birth–6 weeks 30 mins.–1 hr. 15 mins.–4 hrs. 4–8
6 Weeks– 3 Months 45 mins.– 1 hr., 45 mins. 30 mins.–2 hrs. 3–5
4 Months 1–2 hrs. 30 mins.–2 hrs. 3–4
5 Months 1 hr., 15 mins.–2.5 hrs. 30 mins.–2 hrs. 3
6 Months 1.5–3 hrs. 45 mins. –2 hrs. 3
7 Months 1 hr., 45 mins.– 3.5 hrs. 45 mins. –2 hrs. 2–3
8 Months 2–3.5 hrs. 1–2 hrs.
9–12 Months 2–4 hrs. 1–2 hrs.
12–18 Months 5–6 hrs. (if 1 nap)
3–4 hrs. (if 2 naps) 1–3 hrs. 1–2
18 Months– Done Napping 5 hrs. 1–3 hrs. 0–1
*Most babies need to stay awake progressively longer as the day goes on. Thus, the amount of time between when your baby wakes for the day and nap #1 will generally be shorter than that between the end of nap #1 and the start of nap #2. And the amount of time between the last nap of the day and bedtime should be the longest time your baby is awake. Hence, the lowest number would most likely apply to the first wake time and the highest number to the last wake time.
Use the chart as a touchstone, but adjust the times based on your observations with your child. Most parents are pretty canny when it comes to figuring out how long their child needs to be awake between naps.
As noted in the chart, the optimal time is a moving target (babies can remain awake longer as they get older), so be prepared to regularly re-evaluate your nap timing.
“Time Awake” vs. “By the Clock”
When your baby is younger (generally under 6 months), naps will flutter about like a drunken mosquito. As your baby gets older, though, things will become more regular: Baby will tend to wake at the same time every day, nap duration will become more consistent, and bedtime will happen at the same time every day.
As sleep becomes more predictable (usually sometime between 4 and 9 months), you can segue from the Wake-Time Method to the By-the-Clock Method. “By the clock” is just what it sounds like: napping at a specific time every day. Having a consistent by-the-clock nap schedule simplifies your ability to plan around naps and creates a predictable rhythm to your child’s sleep/wake pattern. It’s clearly an appealing alternative for parents, who are often fatigued by the pandemonium of random nap schedules.
The transition from Wake Time to By the Clock is often a gradual process that happens without your involvement. Predictability in sleep schedules begins with a consistent bedtime, which will commonly lead to a consistent morning wake up, which in turn creates the opportunity to make nap #1 happen by the clock. For example, if your child is routinely waking at 6 a.m. and can comfortably remain awake for 2 hours until nap #1, you can peg nap #1 at 8 a.m.
Nap #1 is often the first to fall into a predictable duration. When this happens, you can now have a “by the clock” time for nap #2. Continuing with our example, if your child is consistently waking from nap #1 at 10 a.m. and needs to be awake for 3 hours before nap #2, you can lock in the second nap at 1 p.m.
Parents often ask, “When should we shift to napping by the clock?”
Answer: “When you reasonably can.”
Most parents are pretty keen to have some idea of what to expect during the day, so mindfully working toward By the Clock (when appropriate) is a great goal that appeases both the Goddess of Consistency as well as your own sanity.
Sleep Schedules
When you’re desperately sleep deprived, your brain stops working efficiently; higher functions like math and critical thinking become as challenging as spellin and calkulus. Unsurprisingly, chronically sleep-deprived parents like concrete baby sleep schedules, ones that don’t require math or decision making. But I want to caution you that sleep schedules are not as concrete and easy as you might hope...
Newborn sleep is a capricious hummingbird. One nap might be 30 minutes, the next, 3 hours. Trying to shoehorn a younger baby into a fixed schedule leads to bedlam for the following reasons:
Variability in nap duration will sabotage your attempt at locking in on a schedule.
Younger babies are particularly vulnerable to “awake too long/too short” issues. If you’ve picked the wrong sleep schedule, it’s easy to unintentionally end up with a baby who takes crap naps because they’ve been awake too long or not long enough.
The amount of time your baby can be awake is constantly expanding, which means that the schedule that works today may not work next week. A baby who mysteriously fights naps is often simply on a schedule that no longer fits that child.
Take, for example, the popular 2–3–4 schedule (babies are awake 2 hours before nap #1, 3 hours before nap #2, and 4 hours before bedtime). This is a great schedule... provided you are the parent of a 9- to 12-month-old. Trying to implement the 2–3–4 plan with a 4-month-old would be a mess, pushing your baby to stay awake far longer than they can handle.
Similarly, some approaches tout having babies nap every 90 minutes throughout the day. This will work like gangbusters for your 4-month-old, who is developmentally ready to be awake about 90 minutes between naps. But it’ll keep your newborn awake far too long and will frustrate your older baby, who won’t be ready to sleep so soon.
I’m not saying schedules are bad per se, but they’re challenging for babies with unpredictable nap durations. Make sure you’re applying the right schedule at the right age. And be mindful that your rapidly changing baby may outgrow the current schedule in the twinkling of a mischievous monkey’s eye.
Rather than taking a preset schedule and trying to fit your child into it, if you follow your child’s lead as they establish their own predictable nap durations, they’ll tell you what their schedule is.
The Newborn Exception to the Rule
The Three Conventions of Nap Nirvana apply to all babies all the time. If, however, you gave birth yesterday and have only been home from the hospital for 5 minutes, feel free to relax. You get a 2-week “I Just Had a Baby” pass that allows you to be inconsistent and go with the flow.
The Fourth Convention of Nap Nirvana
What? You thought there were only three? Perchance I said “three.” I just didn’t want to overwhelm you. “Three” sounds cute and achievable. Like three itty-bitty widdle things. Four sounds like AAARGH, FOUR THINGS? I CAN’T EVEN GET FOUR PIECES OF CLOTHING ON MY BODY!
The Fourth Convention of Nap Nirvana is that by about 4 to 6 months, your baby must fall asleep independently.* Failure to heed the almighty Fourth Convention of Nap Nirvana leads to short naps and persistent nap battles.
* * *
*If you’ve read the whole book, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but some people prefer to skip ahead, in which case this is news.
Teaching your child to fall asleep independently at naptime is the second biggest challenge you will face in the first year of parenting. (The first biggest challenge is, of course, growing a baby and then getting Baby out of your body. The third biggest challenge is funding your new coffee habit. Because there is nothing more critical than a hot cup of coffee in the morning. Can’t pay the heating bill? I can wear a sweater. But keep the hot coffee coming or I will punch you in the mouth.) It is critical that you work toward putting your child down for naptime awake and that they fall asleep on their own.
All of the things discussed in Chapter 4, How Babies Sleep, apply to naps. Soothing, consistency, and timing are fantastic, but as your child grows older than 4 to 6 months, independent sleep is crucial.
Frustratingly, a child who has learned how to sleep at bedtime cannot transfer that knowledge to naptime. You are probably thinking, “What. The. Ever-Loving Blazes. Is This Madness?!” I cannot give you a compelling scientific explanation for it, but babies need to learn independent sleep twice.
The happy corollary to this, however, is that rocking/feeding/cuddling to sleep at naptime will not confuse the issue at bedtime. Sleeping one way for naps and another for bedtime will not incite the ire of the Goddess of Consistency.
How to Put Your Child Down Awake at Naptime
I will tell you exactly how to put your child down awake at naptime. However, the price for this information is $1,000.
Or, you could flip back to the chapters on teaching your child how to fall asleep without you (Chapters 6 and 7 on SLIP/SWAP). Either works great for me.
Nap success with SLIP/SWAP will be entirely predicated on your commitment to the first three nap conventions. Trying to teach independent sleep at naptime without adherence to those would be, in the immortal words of Vizzini,* “Inconceivable!”
* * *
*From The Princess Bride.
Additionally, you’ll likely want to address naps after you’ve successfully established independent sleep at bedtime. Why?
