How to help babies nap longer
This question is not a joke! :)
Here's what I understand of sleep, true of most people. A full sleep cycle has many stages. The first stage of lighter sleep usually lasts 20-30 minutes. After that, if you stay asleep, you transition into deeper sleep. However, during the transition periods it's easy to wake up (incidentally, if you wake up during between phases rather than in the middle of a phase, you wake up more refreshed vs. groggy). Many babies need to learn how to stay asleep and transition into that deeper sleep.
My 4-month old is currently taking many short naps a day 25-45 minutes each (1 or 2 short phases). This makes her tire more easily so she has an insane wake/sleep schedule, napping every hour or so - sometimes even after 30 minutes. It also makes her lack some deep sleep during the day so she is extremely tired & cranky in the evenings. She can only take long naps when we are on the go so that the moment she begins to stir, she is rocked back to sleep in the stroller, car, or carrier. Or sometimes I can pick her up from bed and rock her back to sleep but that is near impossible with a 3 year old around.
Here are things that I have tried that worked for my son but don't seem to work for her:
- putting her to nap in her bed, letting her fall asleep on her own (this worked best for my son)
- letting her nap with constant white noise (a fan)
- letting her nap with soft music playing
- run to her the moment she stirs and give her a pacifier
- letting her cry for a few minutes to see if she'd go back to sleep on her own
Have you had to teach your babies how to nap? What worked for you?
2 Answers
-
We have had great luck having our babies sleep in our arms when they were little. When they would wake up a bit, we could jiggle them a little while saying "shhhh" and they would go back to sleep. Once they got in the habit of longer naps and weren't overtired all the time, they got better at staying asleep for longer on their own.
-
Our girl took almost exactly 40 min naps until she was six months or so (many naps were shorter than that, too). At some point we finally realized she was getting crazy little real sleep, which explained a lot of the crankiness and lack of fun. I kept a sleep journal for a few days to confirm this, and then started doing everything we could to help her sleep better and longer. I read about this tip that if you tiptoe in about 5-10 min BEFORE they would normally wake up (in our case, at 35 min) and tickle the cheek (or do some slight disturbing) just a little, just enough to get her to slightly stir, then sigh and go back to sleep, that actually resets the sleep cycle, and there's another 30-40 min of sleep to be had. This, if I recall my sleep deprived haze correctly, helped us get her better rested, which helped with the night sleep, which in turn helped with the naps and generally catching up on zzz. I goofed it up probably twice, but succeeded enough times to have benefit.
Hope you find something that helps! We also had a girl who WHEN SHE WAS UP, SHE WAS UP!
Thanks for the tip. I tried it a few times yesterday without success. :(
Part of the problem is that sometimes she sleeps 30 minutes and sometimes she sleeps 40 minutes. Yesterday I went to rustle her at 25 minutes and she still took a nap 40 minutes total. Another nap, I tried at 25 minutes, and then again at 35 minutes. She took a 45 minute nap total.... Oh well.
Haven't given up on this method though. Will keep trying.
- sweethi, Mar 22, 2010