Naps

[Blahblah2000]

I have a 2.5 year old who for the past year or so has been having a 2.5 - 3 hour nap from around midday.

We got rid of his dummy (he only had this for sleeping) around 3 months ago which meant it was taking him a bit longer to drop off to sleep generally but not much.

For the past few weeks it has been taking well over an hour to get him down for his nap. I have tried moving his nap to start at 1pm but it still takes ages for him to go down. Once asleep, he can happily still go for 3 hours but I'm having to wake him up so as not to totally mess up bedtime. He was going to bed at 7 - 7.15pm, which we have pushed back a bit, but he now sometimes isn't asleep until nearly 9pm. He wakes between 6 - 6.30 regardless of bedtime.

How do you know when they are ready to drop the nap? Was he simply getting too much sleep before?

Thanks

[FATEdestiny]

How do you know when they are ready to drop the nap?

The difficulty going to sleep at lunchtime will be 100% due to no longer having a dummy.

To answer your question, you can't tell. Because even if he wanted/needed to sleep in the daytime he is now going to struggle without his dummy. The more he needs a nap (ie the more over tired a child is), the harder it is to go to sleep.

So not going to sleep at lunchtime and it getting progressively harder to get yo slerp could as much be due to not having his sleep trigger (dummy) as actually not needing the sleep.

If you don't let him nap, what's he like? That's your answer. If he's fine and no tiredness, he doesn't need the nap. If not, he does need the nap.

I would set an 'awake by' time. The latest you can wake him so that bedtime is unaffected and stick to that. So always wake him by a certain time. If he is then grouchy and bad tempered on that amount of limited sleep, you know he does need more sleep but the dummy going is the issue. If he's fine when not getting his full 3h, then he doesn't need as much sleep.

Personally, to completely avoid this issue, I would not remove the dummy until after daytime napping was finished.

[Blahblah2000]

That's really helpful - I just only wish od asked for advice before getting rid of the dummy! But it has been months now so am not keen to reintroduce it to then have to get rid again.

If he doesn't nap at all he is very grouchy and goes to bed at 6pm. It doesn't usually come to this unless we are out (he didn't sleep in the pushchair even with a dummy) as he does eventually go to sleep.

I think I will take tour advice on an awake time of 3ish, try and persevere with a midday nap and see how we go from there. Today he only actually took 15 mins to go to sleep and only slept for 1.5 hours and is totally fine now.