How to avoid baby getting overtired when they skip a nap!
How to avoid a baby getting overtired when they skip a nap!
When your baby takes 30 to 45 minute naps, it sucks. So let’s fix it quickly. I have 10 tips for you to help you extend your baby’s naps.
How to avoid baby getting overtired when they skip a nap!
Tips to help extend your baby’s naps:
- If your baby cannot put themselves to sleep, and they don’t know how to self soothe then that’s the biggest problem and that needs to be fixed first. So before you even start working on naps, your baby needs to be falling asleep by themselves in their own space at bedtime. You need to go watch this video right here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdQVjGvFHdI, to help your baby fall asleep independently at bedtime and then come back to the next tips!
- Your baby sleep environment needs to be perfect. Especially during the day when it’s bright out, your baby’s room needs to be pitch black. If you don’t have a blackout solution in your baby’s room yet, I recommend blackoutEZ window covers. And they need to have consistent white noise; you might find that the white noise needs to be louder during the day to drown out daytime noises than it does at night.
- If your child has enough sleep pressure, are they tired enough? Maybe they’re a little bit tired but they still need maybe like 30 more minutes of awake time in order to build enough sleep pressure to be able to connect one sleep cycle to the next to take a long nap, long being an hour for hour and a half max two hours. If you’re not familiar with wake windows, grab my free baby sleep guide.
- Look at your baby’s level of hunger. We want to follow and eat, play, and sleep routine. When your child is waking up in the morning, you’re getting them up and ready for the day, you’re going to feed them, then they’re going to play and then they’re going to sleep. So you’re not associating eating with sleeping and your baby will have enough time to digest their food. If you’re unsure of how often or how much your child needs to be eating, I highly recommend speaking to your pediatrician or speaking to a lactation counselor. But, obviously if your baby is not getting enough to eat before their nap, then they’re going to wake up being hungry.
- This next thing is difficult for parents because once you feel like your baby is awake, you want to rush in, but stop! Pause. Most babies are active loud sleepers when they are transitioning from one sleep cycle to the next, they may let out a cry, but that doesn’t mean they’re upset, doesn’t mean they feel abandoned, and doesn’t mean that they need help falling back to sleep. Give them 5 to 10 minutes, see if they will fall back to sleep and connect the sleep cycle on their own.
- Focus on the concept that maybe long naps are not developmentally appropriate for your child yet. Naps consolidate and start to become predictable at six months of age. If your baby is only 3 to 5 months old, then having 30 to 45 minute naps is completely age appropriate.
- If your child is younger than six months old, then extending their naps or assisting them to sleep is 100% age appropriate and you might need to do this. But on the other end of the spectrum, if your child is older than six months old, then yes, you might need to sleep, train for these naps to have them connect their sleep cycles so that they will sleep longer stretches.
I hope you learned a lot from this, please share it with a mom friend who may be struggling with short naps and keep.
Share this blog post with a friend and Keep Blooming!
Missy Yandow
Pediatric Sleep Consultant
Potty Training Coach
