What to do When Baby has a Short Nap
Last week we talked about how long to extend a short nap for, but what do you do when a short nap is actually happening?!
You’ve got some options and they’ll depend on a lot of things, like the associations or props your child has around sleep, whether you have multiple children, things to do, or even just the age of your child! As always, you know them best.
**Early bedtime is always an option when your child takes short naps so don’t feel like you *have* to get them to take longer naps. There’s no evidence based resource for how long a nap should be or how many hours of naps there should be in a day. Our only evidence based resource is for TOTAL sleep.
If your child is younger than 4-6 months, please know that short naps are developmentally normal as naps take longer to consolidate and lengthen in their brain. When they have a short nap as a newborn, know that it may take a lot of work to get them back to sleep! I would usually attempt for 15-20 mins to get them back to sleep. If no sleep happened, then we just fed and moved on with the day. This is valid!
If your child is older than 4-6 months, then you can still help them back to sleep if you’d like, HOWEVER– they may have a more difficult time being put back down whenever you extend their nap. If they’ve already slept some and released some sleep pressure, their drive to sleep is even lower making transfers more difficult with a nap extension. This often means if you’ve helped them back to sleep by being held/rocked, you may have to hold them for the remainder of the nap.
(Yes, rocking, feeding, holding, bouncing, etc in anyway is FINE to help them back to sleep!)
You can also go in and give them their pacifier if they use one or try to pat/shush them back to sleep in their sleep space.
It can always be beneficial to practice the pause after a short nap and see if they’re able to go back to sleep without intervention, especially if they fell asleep independently to start the nap.
If they’re currently being assisted to sleep, I would plan to continue whatever got them to sleep in the first place to get them back to sleep after a short nap.
If you’re struggling and want to work on short naps, here’s some resources for you:
Ready to sleep train? Check out the 1:1 options here!
