Let’s be honest, this will not answer all your questions. But, these are my general guidelines for what you can expect for napping during the first 3-4 months of your baby’s life. The first guideline is don’t stress out, they will grow out of it. You can practice helpful sleep strategies during this stage, but this is not a time when you can do any actual sleep training. So use wake times as a guideline for when you can try to put your baby down for a nap, and give yourself freedom to make like Elsa and "let it go."
In the first 3 months of life (the 4th trimester), babies will typically take about 4-5 naps per day. The expectation is for average daily day sleep of 4-6 hours ; starting out closer to 6 hours and moving to 4 hours as they get older. The awake period (length of time you expect your baby awake between sleeps) you can expect your baby to tolerate starts around 1 hour at 1 month and increases by about 15 minutes each month and then to 2 hours around 4 months. Wake periods are a helpful tool to use in this time frame to make sure you’re avoiding an overtired baby, but you have the flexibility to adjust to different wake times each day and various nap lengths. Around 4 months, you may see a window open to move your baby to 3 naps a day. A “typical” three nap/day schedule based on wake windows is something like: a morning nap, an afternoon nap and then a shorter evening nap (often timed around 4-5 pm), followed about 1-2 hours after waking, with bedtime. As your baby gets older, you may see that they tolerate a longer wake window in the morning and that this shortens as the day progresses. Eventually you will see that the timing of the naps tends to fall around the same times each day and you can start putting your baby down at specific times. Enter the nap prison portion of your parenting... A note about the infamous "Cat" nap…. In this early stage, babies may also take very lovely (sarcasm implied) “cat naps” where they sleep for 15-30 minutes at a time, as often as every hour. As a parent adjusting to life with a newborn, these can be very frustrating and make you feel like you aren’t going to ever have control over your life again. And, while you won’t ever have control over your life again, you will be able to gain some control over your schedule once your baby is a little older. I remember being told how normal these cat naps were, and wanting to cause harm to the person who told me that, as she laughed it off as just another thing a new mom had to get used to. Now, while it is annoying, you don’t have to get used to it because it will go away. Use this window in your baby’s early life to get out and celebrate not being tied down by naptime. That will come soon enough. If you have a cat napper, I am sorry, but do what I did not do and avoid spending endless hours trying to change that. It will change, but not because of anything you really do in those first couple of months. If you have questions about things you can be trying to “practice” during this time to get you on track to sleep training once they are old enough, or just any questions about what all of this means, please don’t hesitate to reach out! You do not have to sort through all of the information out there alone. I already did that for you!
2 Comments
Andria Knechel
3/3/2020 03:05:39 pm
How do you know if you have a catnapper or if the baby just wakes up mid nap and should go back to sleep? She was following a eat, sleep, awake routine until a few days ago I read that that’s wrong. She is a bad napper, basically only staying asleep if I hold her. Starting Saturday I’ve been trying to keep her to the eat, awake, sleep pattern and she is doing much better - sleeping in her bassinet, putting herself to sleep, sleeping longer. What do you do though when they wake up from a nap after 15, 30, or 45 min and it’s not time to eat again? I don’t want to get stuck in the wrong pattern again but I also don’t want to listen to her cry a long time to go back to sleep or have to hold her for her whole nap. She’s 9 weeks old and has reflux. Help!
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3/4/2020 06:37:55 pm
Andrea,
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