When to Change Awake Times
When you finally nail the perfect nap and bedtime timing for your child, you may start to feel this impending doom knowing that the schedule won’t be that way forever and they will need tweaks as they get older, need less sleep, and drop naps.
But what are the signs to change awake times? How do you know they need a schedule adjustment?
First, if nothing else resonates from this blog, let this be the thing that does: AGE IS NOT A REASON TO CHANGE AWAKE TIMES.
The reason we don’t want to use age as a reason to change awake times is because if they’re not truly ready for a change/tweak, then they can get overtired and it can force them to drop naps sooner than they may be ready to because they’ll run out of time for naps with extending awake times.
Okay, okay— so when to change awake times and how do you know if it’s schedule related or something else?
It does help to have a baseline for their sleep so if sleep is sort of all over the place, it can be difficult to pinpoint needing a schedule change. Logging sleep for a week can help you identify patterns/trends but it can also keep you accountable to following the same awake times each day. If you’re not sure where to start with awake times, this is the one time we use age as a marker. You can figure out your child’s sleep needs by using the averages in this blog, determine your starting awake times, and use them for a week to gather some data. This will tell you if it’s working or not!
Signs to change awake times:
Taking longer than 15 or so minutes to fall asleep for a nap or bedtime (change where you’re having the issue)
A nap that was previously over an hour is now under an hour consistently (3-5+ day trend)
Unusual night time wakings (our sign was our feeding would move earlier in the night)
Happy, long night time wakings (if you cannot add more awake time, shorten day sleep a little bit)
Early morning wake ups
Need more timing help? Check out these blogs:
