Episode 175: When Should I Switch from 3-2 Naps?

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Welcome to the kids sleep show, podcast where we dive into the magical world of sleep and all things parenting. Join us as we embark on a journey filled with expert advice, practical tips and heartwarming stories that will transform your little ones into sleep superheroes and empower you to navigate the beautiful chaos of parenting. I’m your host, Courtney Zenz, and I’m on a mission to change how the world views sleep and provide accessible sleep coaching resources for all families to build healthy sleep habits in their home for children and adults of all ages. As an award winning speaker, author and pediatric sleep expert, myself and my team of consultants work intimately with families around the world to teach healthy sleep habits to children and adults. I believe wholeheartedly that sleep is the foundation for which a happy home is built. So let’s sleep together. Hey, everyone. Courtney zentier, welcome to this week’s episode of the Kids sleep show. I’m going to talk to you today all about when you should move from three to two naps for your infant snap schedule. There really is a perfect age in which you make this transition, and if you don’t make the transition at the right age, you generally find there are sleep issues somewhere else. A child will not sleep through the night. They will wake early. They will fight their naps and going down. And sometimes parents can get into what they believe is a sleep regression, but it’s something that can actually really just be fixed by the right nap timing. Now sleep and independent, consolidated restorative sleep for babies, comes when children first are getting the right intake. So you do have to manage and make sure that your baby’s getting 24 to 32 ounces breast milk or formula in the daytime hours to sleep through the night, and by the time they are reaching the two nap schedule. That should not be a problem. The second thing is the skill to settle to sleep without your help. A lot of times, clients will call me and say we are nursing to sleep or bottle feeding to sleep. We have to rock to sleep. We are still co sleeping, and we don’t want to, because we know it’s not safe, but it is the only way we can get this baby to go to bed, and we really want to stop that independent sleep is a skill set, my friends, so if you can teach your baby that skill, just like everything else they’re going to learn over the next 18 years, that is going to be something they will take with them when you travel, when you are visiting relatives, when you have to change sleep arrangements up because somebody’s visiting, right? When kids become good sleepers, they have the skill. It means they’re adaptable, and you can do anything, and they will sleep. So it is a beautiful gift to give your child at this age and stage. Though, when they’re moving to two naps, you’re probably still a little bit in the thick of it. I loved when my son was 12 months old, because I moved right to one nap and life seemed, frankly, a bit more manageable. However, at this age, they are still too young to do that. So if you are right now doing a three nap schedule, your baby is likely somewhere between five months old and seven months old. If you are doing a three nap schedule over seven months old, meaning they’re eight months old or nine months old, and they’re on a three nap schedule, you are probably finding other challenges at bedtime, overnight or early in the morning. That being said, I do want to make one small disclaimer, if your child is in daycare and they are capable of settling independently and taking three one hour naps roughly around 930 1230 and 330 they will likely still go to bed at seven without any problem. My kids were in daycare full time from 12 weeks old through five years old, and that is the schedule that they did for quite a while when they were in the infant room, and because they had good sleep skills, they could do it. They sleep through the night. They would wake up appropriately in the morning. And that three nap schedule was not a problem, but you have to have the other foundational stuff first for that to work. For many families, if you are home with your child. If your child is in daycare and they have a rigid schedule, because some do every daycare is different, they will put your child on that schedule, or you’ll want to have a schedule, or maybe you have to manage a toddler schedule with an infant, right? So you’re like, Well, I can’t have three naps, or I can’t have two naps because we have to do pickup or drop off or car line or something else with another sibling, which is a total reality. You can do the three nap schedule. I just find for many people, it’s not the quote ideal, right? And I tell you ideals, let me explain that parenting is never perfect. It is never ideal, and there’s always going to be things that you know kind of shake us and rattle us a bit. But in the general scheme of things, if you are trying to identify if you have a sleep regression, or if something else is going on and your child is six months old or seven months old, they should be in the process right now of moving to a two nap schedule when somebody hires me for sleep consulting in the private coaching capacity at six months old, I will generally start our sleep training with three naps, because a child who still has to learn how to sleep overnight is going to have sleep debt. Okay, so they’re going to have to get rid of the sleep debt overnight. They’re going to have to learn to learn to settle, build their skill sleep through the night, and then we shift, by the end of the three weeks together, over to the two nap schedule, and it works beautifully. The Sleep debt’s gone. They’re feeling happy and rested and balanced. They can tolerate that wake window, and they move and do really well, thriving on a two nap schedule. When somebody comes to me at seven months old, no matter what their situation, I will put their child on a two nap schedule again, unless it’s a daycare situation where there’s some caveats around the way in which they manage the day of daycare, okay, or the way in which you manage having to pick them up. So, you know, some kids do half day, full day, lots of things, general rule of thumb for a seven month old should be two naps. Between six and seven months is the age. So to answer your question around the title of this podcast, when do I move my child from three naps to two naps? The answer is generally between six and seven months old. Okay, that is for your baby’s benefit of their body clock. What do I mean? When your child wakes in the morning, they’re building something called adenosine. Adenosine is sleep pressure. Sleep pressure is a neurotransmitter from which is secreted from the brain and triggers kind of this balance of hormones across the day, right when kids are awake too long. Or a lot of times, parents are like, my baby’s not tired. They don’t want to nap. It’s like, well, they are. You’re just missing the signs. Or when you see the signs, you’ve already missed the idea window, which is a lot of parents problems. Okay, the reason it’s important is because your body’s actually really smart, and it goes, Hey, well, wait a minute. If you’re you know, little Johnny didn’t go to bed, it must mean they’re trying to stay awake. So let me share some stimulant hormones to keep them awake. Now, all of a sudden, you’re in an overtired situation, in which case there’s a lot more tears and bussing and protest for your baby to go down, and they don’t want to, because now they’re overstimulated. It’s like they snorted a pixie stick. And then all of a sudden, you’re trying to put them down for a nap. They don’t want to take the nap, right? They want to go run around and play and goo goo Gaga like you got to be understanding of the fact that there is an aspect of all of this that’s hormonal balance, and that’s kind of what sets the baseline. You have skill, you have intake, and then you have timing. Those are the three pieces of a formula for a child who sleeps. Well, I don’t care how old they are, okay, so that’s where you want to start. Now. What should the timing really look like when you’re on a three nap schedule? I already kind of mentioned it. If your kids on a seven o’clock to seven o’clock day, meaning they’re sleeping 11 to 12 hours overnight, okay, which is generally what parents want, okay, that means their schedule in the daytime at three naps is going to look something like 930 1233 30.

Okay, give or take again, I’m giving you averages, right? Because your child’s sleep cycles gonna kind of dictate this a little bit. So sometimes it might be like, hey, if we put them down at, you know, 930 they sleep till 1020 Okay, well, then maybe they take a little bit longer kind of nap around lunchtime, so instead of 50 minutes, maybe they sleep for an hour and 20 but then they’re still able to go down for another 40 to 50 minutes or one cycle in the afternoon. It’s all about balance, because you’re trying to protect over tired. Okay, when you get to six months, your child’s wake window kind of goes from between two and a half and 245 to three hours as a baseline when they’re sleeping well, so they have the ability to tolerate that two nap schedule a seven to seven day when a child is between six and 12 months, kind of looks like this. 10 o’clock is always that fixed. First nap. Okay, they’re either going to sleep from 10 to 1110, to 1130 or 10 to 12. The second nap is always three hours later, and will complete the three hours of total sleep need for this age, meaning they sleep from 10 to 11, they’re going to go from two to four. If they sleep from 10 to 1130, they’re going to do 230 to four, and if they do 10 to 12, they’re generally going to do three to four. You see, all three scenarios are fine for a two nap schedule, and still gets your child up at four and ready to go to bed at seven, which is what’s ideal for babies at this age, and allows them to have that consolidated. Sleep overnight. Some families are an eight to eight family. Some families are a 730 to 730 it doesn’t really matter. You can follow the same structure, just bumping things out by 30 minutes or an hour. So if you’re an eight to eight type family, and that works best for you, then that fixed snap would be at 11, and then they would be up by five. So you see, it’s three hours of total daytime sleep with a three hour wake window. There are some sleep consultants who extend the Wake window from last nap to bedtime. I will never do that, and I’ll tell you why, because if that child gets over tired going into bedtime, they have trouble settling. They have multiple night wakings, and they have early morning wakings. I would always prefer that you push a child a little bit harder to get to that 10 o’clock window in the morning and have them go into bed rested without being over tired. And I don’t know why sleep consultants say to do that or to extend up to four hours, because it’s just too much time. They’re too awake, they’re too overstimulated, there is too much adenosine, and it just derails things. So it’s something to really be mindful of. I worked with a client once at six months old, and they were only going to swim lessons on Monday night, and every Monday night, guess what happens? Sleep sucked, and they couldn’t really figure out why. And it was, you know, we’re together for three weeks, and it was kind of that first Monday night where it happened after the kid was sleeping through the night, and the parents like, what is going on with this? Like they were doing so well, they slept through the night for five nights, and now this happened, like, what are you doing on Monday? Take me through everything you just did. Because there’s no reason once you have a child who builds that skill and the schedules right, that they should be waking that’s just as simple as that, Okay, at this age. So she said, Oh, we have swim lessons. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that’s it. That’s it. Like you gotta put your kid to bed, bring their change of clothes to swim lessons, put them in their pajamas, offer that last bottle, and then on your way home, if they fall asleep, go right to the crib and transfer them. Do not try to come home and have a little milk and do your bedtime routine and get them in their pajamas, because they are so strung out by the time you do that. And they just exerted a lot of energy, even in a 30 minute swim lesson. But they’re ready for bed. Put them to sleep. So that’s going to be what you really want to pay attention to is that avoiding a retired so again, I’m not somebody who follows the belief that you should push that last wake window unless your child is taking too long to settle as they get closer to 12 months old, what you’ll start to notice happens is A child will maybe lay in bed happy but awake, right? That means they’re not ready. That means you can start to push their wake window, maybe about five to 10 minutes at a time. It should not take more than 10 minutes for a child to settle to sleep, and they’re not crying, okay? It’s that they are calm. They are laying in their crib, they are flopping around. Maybe they’re wiggling to one spot in the crib trying to get comfortable. If your baby is taking longer than, frankly, even five minutes, you gotta adjust the timing a little bit. Now, when you first get started, there’s skill development. But as you have a child who understands the skill and is doing quite well at it, that’s how you start to know that it’s time to push their wake window a little bit and to give them a little bit more time and opportunity to settle independently when they’re ready. Right? I was actually talking with one of my concierge clients tonight, so I do have some programs that are a bit longer of support, you know, for parents that want to keep us around, basically on call for a period of 12 months. And she said, you know, what’s going on with this? You know, they were doing so great, and all of a sudden they’re taking, like, a few minutes to to go down, longer than I really would, like, you know? And we’ve been working together since last July. So when I’m recording this, it’s February, right? So this child is doing really well, you know. And every once in a while, the mom will have something going on, and I’m like, we gotta bump, you know? We gotta just bump the Wake window a bit. And we did. And last night they settled in like sub four minutes, whereas the night before, it was like 20 minutes, and they weren’t unhappy, they just weren’t going to bed, you know. And that’s how you can kind of tell when children are crying, going down, and they have the skill of independent sleep, meaning they know how to put themselves to sleep without your help. That is generally that they’re over tired when they lay there and are like LA, LA for like 20 minutes. That means they are under tired. You got to change your timing. But in theory, you should lay a child down maybe they fart and they coup for a minute, and then they flop around, and then they should pass out. Is kind of what it should look like. And I’ve been a sleep consultant for over 10 years. I’ve worked with 1000s of families, so I’ve got a pretty good gage on like, what all this looks like and how it should be. So when should you move? As I’ve already answered, somewhere between six and seven months is the ideal. Time that’s, you know, when I would recommend that you adjust to a two nap schedule between six and seven months, and then you stay there till you’re close to around, you know, that kind of 1213, month range, where, again, you’ll start to notice when they’re ready to go to one nap. Sometimes it’s dictated by daycare. My school was, my kids were in daycare. They said, here, they’re going to one nap, we’re going to do it, and they were sorted in a week. Okay? Sometimes parents at home sort of wait a bit longer. I would definitely say by 14 or 15 months, your child should be on one nap. If they are not, you have problems somewhere else. They’re sleeping too much. Somewhere there is an early morning waking they are fighting bedtime. Their bedtime is really late, like I’ve just, I’ve done this enough to see that, yes, they may be, quote, sleeping through the night, but like to your friends in your mom group, that’s like 11 o’clock at night. So you know that’s not ideal. So if your child is between six and seven months, that would be where I would start to make this beautiful transition. And if you’re struggling with sleep, we are here to help. Myself and my team, the slumber squad have worked with hundreds, if not 1000s of families in the past year alone. We are a different kind of sleep coaching, and so I encourage you to set up some time to chat. We have discovery calls that you can chat with myself or anyone on the team. We’ve got specialists in all kinds of areas, and you know, we really are here to support you. So if you haven’t checked out, tinytransitions.com, please, do so you can learn about myself and our amazing team. Here, you can book some time to chat, and I do hope that you give us a nice review and follow us here on the kids sleep show. Thanks so much for tuning into this week’s episode. Bye for now and sweet dreams. One more thing before you go, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review or share this episode with someone you know who could use a little more sleep in their life. For tips and resources. Be sure to visit us@tinytransitions.com or follow us across social media. Here’s to better sleep, brighter days and healthier, happier families you see you.