Managing Short Naps

Hi, my name’s Sarah Patel and I’m an infant sleep consultant and I’m going to talk to you today about some common sleep issues and how you can support these.

So top tips for short naps. So if you feel like your baby is taking short naps and you feel that they’re still really tired in the day, and they need a longer nap, try working out roughly how long their nap is. If it’s around 30 minutes, dry rousing them around 20 minutes. So you might feed them. You might stroke them. You might give them a cuddle and see if you can get them into the next sleep cycle. So that might link them then that by 10, 15, 20 minutes, which could be enough sleep for them.

The other trick is if your baby is doing their naps in the cot, and you’re finding them short, then you could take your baby out and sling the prom, or have a contact nap because often those naps are going to be longer.

Finally, you can try to extend their awake periods. So from the time they wake up in the morning to their first nap, you can try to extend that period to see if that means that the sleep pressure is a little bit higher, which can sometimes result in a longer nap.