Nap Woes
If you have a little one, chances are naps have made you want to pull your hair out at some point or another. As hard as they can be, naps do not inherently suck. Naps are the best! Even as adults, a nap can be so invigorating, both mentally and physically. Babies and toddlers, however, NEED naps in order to keep themselves happy and thriving.
But when you first begin teaching your little one the important skill of falling asleep independently, you are likely to notice that they manage to get the hang of bedtime pretty quickly. When it comes to daytime sleep, well that can be an entirely different story.
Out of all the babies I have worked with, I’d say about 90% of them have had some trouble around naps. They have a more difficult time falling asleep or they tend to wake up after their first sleep cycle (the dreaded 45 minute point) and struggle to get back to sleep again afterwards.
And as you may be quite familiar with by now, when your baby doesn’t get a solid nap in, it sucks.
They are grouchy, fussy until they go down for another nap, and then you end up needing to soothe and settle them instead of knocking out that never-ending parental to-do list that you could have focused on if they took a full snooze.
So yes, naps themselves do not suck, but I’m sure you can agree that putting your baby down for a nap, tiptoeing out their room, and getting two steps into the other room, only to hear them stir and begin to cry, really sucks.
So let’s go through why naptime can have so many struggles so you don’t have to pull out your precious post-partum hairs. First off…
1) Daylight is the worst – our bodies are designed to fall into a 24-hour rhythm and there’s a physiological reason for that. Sunlight, or any short wavelength light like blue light (similar to lights from phone or computer screens), stimulates cortisol production. Cortisol is a stimulant and can majorly interfere with the ability to settle and fall asleep. So getting your baby away from blue light sources about an hour before naptime can help.
That’s not always possible though. If you baby is younger than 6 weeks, their ideal wake time is only 45 minutes to an hour! You can’t keep them indoors and away from screens all the time, so instead try to keep that light exposure closer to the time when they first wake up and begin reducing it as it gets closer to their next naptime.
Also – invest in some good quality blackout curtains for their nursery! I can’t tell you how great of an investment good blackout curtains will be in the long run. Keeping their room dark will help ensure long, high-quality naps.
2) Lack of melatonin – The counterpart to cortisol, melatonin is the hormone that helps our bodies wind down and prepare for sleep. Unfortunately, melatonin production doesn’t fully start up until nighttime for most people, including little ones. So this means that sleep pressure is much lower during the day than it is at night, which can really hinder your baby’s ability to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep for a long stretch at naptime.
But, we can find some other ways to build up that sleep pressure! Going outside with your baby after they wake up is a simple way to do that. Sunlight stimulates that cortisol production we talked about earlier, but it also helps boost melatonin production in the evening. This will help your baby sleep better at night, which then allows them to sleep better during the day.
And obviously, physical activity is a great way to promote better napping. However your child likes to move, get them moving as soon as possible! Have this be earlier in their wake/play time rather than just before nap. Their body will need a little wind down time so don’t expect them to instantly be able to fall asleep after lots of play and movement.
3) FOMO – nobody likes missing out on something they love so they can sleep, and babies are no different. If your child was just playing a great game of peek-a-boo, or watching the latest episode of Paw Patrol, being told it’s time for a nap is not going to be well received. And if your kids are anything like mine, when they protest something, it can be pretty epic.
Timing is everything, so when you can, keep the exciting activities on the earlier end of wake time. When naptime starts getting closer, switch gears into calm activities like looking at books, singing some songs, or cuddles. 15-minutes of wind down can make such a difference, but the big goal is to avoid sparking a tantrum with an abrupt transition like straight to a nap from something they are having so much fun doing.
4) Noises – surely this is a surprise to no one, but loud noises and sleep do not go well together. Dogs, yard crews, sirens, deliverymen, etc. can all disturb your precious sleeping angel. What’s worse, when they are woken up after a short nap, it’s so much harder to get them back to sleep because they reduced some of that sleep pressure you worked so hard to build up in the first place!
So the best solution for this is to drown out these environmental noises with noise! But I mean the good kind: white noise. Sound machines are not sleep inducing by nature, but their job is to provide baseline noise that prevents unexpected noises from causing that startling wake up. Just keep an eye on the volume. They can get ridiculously loud and it’s not recommended for babies to be exposed to noises of 60 dB for extended periods of time. (There are free apps you can use to test decibel readings!)
Even with all these recommendations in play, they are nothing compared to the improvements you’ll see in your child’s naps if they can learn how to fall asleep on their own. More than anything else, this is the one major key to getting your baby sleeping through the night and taking those long, restful naps during the day. If you find that your baby still relies on things like feeding to sleep, rocking to sleep, or snuggling with you in order to take a daytime nap, that is the single most important issue to tackle before you worry about anything else.
Sleep well!
