Ever since Nathan was 4 months old I have had trouble nailing down a good time for him to nap. There are TONS of variables that go into finding the perfect nap time and I rarely seem to make the right calculations in order to set Nathan up for a good nap. Here are a few things to consider:
1. Sleep is SUPER important to kids and their little growing, developing minds and bodies. It could be argued that good, quality sleep is more important than nutrition. Nutrition is super important too, but sleep is even that much more important. So, you can see why I would stress out so much about making sure my little guy gets the rest he needs!
2. You can force wakefulness, but you can't force sleepiness. Children (and probably even adults) have a very specific window of time in which they are at the perfect level of sleepiness in order to allow them to drift off to sleep easily and sleep for an extended period of time, giving them good, solid, quality, restorative rest.
Nathan's "window" is extremely narrow, it seems, and I have had a heck of a time finding that window throughout the day to ensure that he gets good naps in. Finding "Nathan's window" each day is what puts that thorn in my side.
3. Prior to napping, children have an optimal waketime length in which they will eat a meal and then be the most alert for learning and playing activities. During the waketime, they should also have the perfect amount of stimulation (not too much and not too little) in order to be set up for a good nap. As kids grow older their waketime length increases. When increasing waketime lengths, books like "Babywise" and "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" recommend adding five to fifteen minutes of waketime per day until you reach that perfect length of waketime for your child at their given age. Keeping your child up too long will cause them to take a poor nap.
Let me just say that I have NEVER been successful with this. Even when keeping a sleep log of Nathan's nap habits. I've never found what his optimal waketime length was, so I never had a baseline to work with when "adding five to fifteen minutes of waketime before any given nap as he got older." Seriously, it drove me insane and still drives me insane.
4. Babies give off sleep cues to let you know they are getting tired. They also give off signs of being overtired if you keep them up too long. When babies are between the ages of zero and six months, we'll say, you need to put them down for naps/bed when they give off their sleep cues. If you wait too long, and they become overtired, its all over!... They will either take forever to fall asleep (crying, fussing or just talking to themselves and playing in the crib) or they will crash and fall asleep hard, but only sleep for 30 to 45 minutes, which is not considered enough time to be restorative rest.
I did not learn this until Nathan was probably around four months, when his napping issues really ramped up. By then, I realized that I was totally waiting too long to put him down for naps. He would yawn and rub his eyes, which are signs of overtiredness (believe it or not), and so I was then missing the mark of the perfect amount of sleepiness to assure him a good nap. Day after day he would take 30 minute naps and get increasingly more overtired as time went on. You can see how this would easily become a terrible and perpetual cycle!
5. At some point (and I still don't know when this is) babies sort of switch from needing a nap based on waketime length/showing sleepy cues to getting put down for a nap at a set time every day (say 9am and 1pm). "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" says you should start using set nap times of 9am and 1pm as early as five months, but I disagree. According to a poll that was taken on the Babywise blog I follow, babies around five months of age have an optimal waketime length of one hour and 45 minutes to two hours (on the poll, that was the most popular response). (See the full poll results at: http://www.babywisemom.com/2008/08/poll-results-what-wasis-babys.html .)
At five months, I don't think Nathan was anywhere near being able to stay up for two hours. So I most certainly couldn't have a set nap time of 9am, with his day starting at 7am (and some days he would even wake up closer to between 6:20 and 6:45!) Going from 6:45am to 9am was WAY too long for him to be awake. Most days I would have a goal in mind, like, trying to keep him up until 8am, but then he would seem extremely tired already by 7:45, so, I'd quickly put him down for a nap, desperately trying to catch that perfect sleepy window. I would say this worked one out of seven days per week. Most days, he would still only sleep for 30 minutes.
Ok, so that was A LOT of info on infant sleep! I have all of that swimming around in my brain daily, trying to make sure that I set Nathan up for a good nap! Currently, Nathan is about 14 months old and takes one morning nap and one afternoon nap. His morning naps are still a crap shoot; some days they are over an hour, other days they are only 30 to 45 minutes. His afternoon naps are better; some are an hour and some are a glorious two hours! His tolerance for longer waketimes is better too, but that's mainly just because he's older. At this age, however, we are approaching the transition of two naps down to one (which happens around 15 to 18 months). So that throws a whole new set of challenges at me. We'll see how it goes I guess. I can't say I'm looking forward to it.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this tiny look into the daily torture I put myself through, trying to figure out how to set Nathan up for good naps! I blame myself for this as I can be a bit of a perfectionist. I also blame myself for being a naive, new mom blindly following some of the advice of Babywise. Now, don't get me wrong, I have a lot of praise for Babywise, for things that it did help me achieve with Nathan. But I have discovered that I have a love-hate relationship with that series, because of some of the downfalls it led me to, which I will dig into more in a future post.
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