23 Month Old Nap Issues

S.,

My little girl (28 months old) has always naturally NOT been a good sleeper, but people think we have a great sleeper (which we do) and it's because I have worked my hiney off to get there!

She is generally a good sleeper, but whenever we hit a new stage of development a new issue will arise with sleep that perplexes me and that has to be tackled and dealt with...

Just a statistic for you - only 10% of children in the world are ready to drop their nap by age 2. It's possible that your little one is in that very small percentage, but it's an even greater possibility that he has hit a new stage of development that is challenging his sleep patterns.

When my daughter was between 20 and 21 months old, she went on a three month nap strike! 3 MONTHS!!! AAAAHHHHHH!!!! This drove me nuts. I had consigned myself to believe that she was in that VERY small percentage of children that no longer needed a nap! But...because I needed her to still have "nap" time, I kept the same timing and same routine for the whole 3 months. I just mentally determined it was "rest" and self-directed playtime instead. I kept her down for a full nap time - 2 hours - fussing or playing happily. Usually she played happily the whole time. Well, one day out of the blue, she started napping again. She has been napping regularly since. She went through a week or so of waking up crying after 45 minutes (maybe nightmare - not sure), but we have weathered that one too now.

Keep persevering!

God's Grace to you,

Lisa :)

Do you have a nap routine that pretty much mimicks your bedtime routine? That has seemed to help me out...Here are more suggestions I recommend you suggest:

http://www.theskinnyscoop.com/search/nap?utm_campaign=the...

The same thing happened to me with my daughter. I even took her to the doctor to see if she had strep throat or was teething or something! The doctor told me she was loosing her nap. She never napped regularly after that. She'd fall asleep in the car sometimes but I had to let go of the thought of a regular nap time. Good luck.

My 3rd child did something similar. She eventually got to the point she wouldn't even get in the crib for nap or bedtime for any length of time. She slept on the couch or in a bed just fine. We decided to try her in the toddler bed. It worked miracles! The first few days consisted of putting her back in bed several times and even a couple seats to the rear end...but once she settled for the nap or night she was back to her normal sleeping for 3 hour naps amd all night. Maybe he's ready for a big boy bed. Hope you get it figured out soon! :)

My son does the same thing (he's 21 months now). He has very fragmented naps and always wakes up after 30 mins., then at 75 mins., and usually sleeps a total of 2 hours with those two interruptions. You say he's still in a crib? Can you try just leaving him in there for a minimum of 90 minutes whether he wakes up and cries or not? My son now always puts himself back to sleep (he always has used whining/moaning as his self-soothing mechanism--which is completely annoying but it works for him lol) and I know he's done napping when he wakes up happy and I just hear him talking over the baby monitor. By the way, he's also still in a crib and I have no intention of moving him to a big bed until he asks for it (even if that's when he's going into kindergarten!)

I hate to tell you, but he may just be ready to give up his naps. You may think it's not time yet and that he's too young, but he has different ideas. Two of my three children were done with naps by the time they were 2 years old. My youngest is 3 1/2 and she still gets tired/cranky right around 5:00 p.m. (as a matter of fact, so do I! LOL). But even if he's no longer interested in napping you can still insist on a 30-45 minute "rest" time (rest for both him and you!). How many hours of sleep does he get at night? At that age kids typically need 10-11 hours of sleep in total, so you may need to start putting him to bed earlier to make up for the loss of nap time sleep. My little one is asleep by 9:00 p.m. and we wake her up for school around 7:15 a.m.