Hi, Dana here. Today I’m gonna give you three quick fixes for the short nap.

Number one is timing. Really, you have to educate yourself about your baby’s awake window, because if we find this magic window of opportunity it makes putting your child down for a nap so much easier, and it also encourages a longer nap. If you go too soon, you’ll get a short nap, but if you wait too long, you’ll also get a short nap because your baby will be overtired when you put them down, and overtiredness leads to fragmented sleep. So we want to get the timing just right. I’m gonna share with you a little cheat sheet, and I’ll put it in the comment sections below, about timing. So it’ll give you the age ranges. You can look over and see how much time awake does your baby need.

If you have the Sleep Sense Program, I talk a lot about the timing of naps and you can look it up in the nap chapter as well. It gives some different age range awake windows. But this is really important. This is step one to ending that short nap, finding your baby’s awake window. And then don’t be afraid to tinker with it a little bit. You know, try for a few days bringing it up 10 minutes. After three or four days if that’s not working, then try pushing it out 10 minutes or so. But remember, you have to give bodies a chance to adjust. You can’t just keep moving the times around every nap or every day, ’cause that’s not how body clocks work. Body clocks take time to change. So give everything at least three or four days and see if it starts adding length to the nap. So that’s number one.

Number two is darkness. I know, it’s daytime, it’s hard to make it dark, but the darker you can make it, the better the nap will be. We like a nice, dark, cool room in order to take a proper nap. So if you have to put a sheet, like get some black blankets and tape them to the window, get garbage bags, whatever you have to do to get that room nice and dark. I promise you’ll notice, I mean, you’ll notice an improvement in the length. I can’t promise how much longer that might be, but you will definitely get some more length out of the nap if the room is dark enough.

The third tip is comfort. Your baby needs to be comfortable in order to take a good nap. And I mean, I guess it makes common sense when you think about it, but a lot of people, I’ve seen a lot of people putting their babies down in their like jean overalls or their party dress or whatever they were wearing for the day. And think about it from your perspective. If you were going to take an afternoon nap, most likely the first step would be to change into your pajamas or your sweatpants or at minimum, you know, take off your jeans so that you will be more comfortable when you’re having that nap. So change them out, you know, either back into their jammies or maybe you just have a nap outfit. I had a client once who called them the nap pants. And put those on, and that’ll help your child be more comfortable, which will add length to that nap.

Thanks so much for watching. Sleep well.