What the .... Is a contact nap?

[MakeMineALarge1]

Seriously just seen a picture of someone on mat leave, her baby is asleep on her, she's calling it a contact nap?
What the actual fuck, surely baby's just gone to sleep on her.

I don't understand why you're bothered by it OP, who are these people who are being performative about naps in your face all the time?

I didn't call it contact napping, I'd call it 'being stuck under a baby' but it was how most naps went as they'd fall asleep feeding and protest about being put in a moses basket etc. Cot naps are preferable for getting things done!

That’s just what it’s called when a baby goes to sleep on you, isn’t it?

Like in baby groups a common conversation is whether your baby goes down easily in their cot or prefers contact naps (and how nice being nap trapped can be sometimes!).

Maybe it’s a recent thing but NCT, midwives and health visitors have all used the same term with me, it’s just what I learned to call it 🤷‍♀️.

I can totally see your point - baby cuddles are bloody lovely .... is it possible for you to see others' points though?

yes, it's claustrophic. For some people that is a big deal and feels hideous. For others they might be trying to work and rely on baby having a nap in their cot (freelancer). For some mums with PND, only having a baby that 'contact naps' can be really fucking hard and it can become pretty impossible to just settle and chill with netflix if your mind is in an anxiety spiral and all you want is an hour without being touched.

It is well known that when Netflix( other streaming services are available) releases highly anticipated new content the incidence of contact napping increases by about 100%.

Fact.

Another velcro baby here with my eldest, 2nd will go down but only for 30 mins compared to 2 hours on me!

It's referred differently as others said you can't get much done or even sleep!

It's sounds like a term a mum may have made up to justify her baby napping on her, not that you need to justify this, but some people are very firm believers of always putting baby down to nap.

Women really can’t do anything without being accused of being performative. Sheesh, let the poor woman have her contact nap!
Maybe if women were allowed to freely talk about and name all the funny little bits of caring for a baby (instead of being told, it’s just a nap! Get on with it!) we’d have fewer new mums feeling isolated.

I genuinely don’t understand a lot of parenting now (my DC are in their 30s). Like skin to skin. I bonded perfectly well with my DC without the need to strip off! I’d have given the midlife a weird look had she suggested it! But then I did bottle feed which was seen as a perfectly valid choice back then. Someone on my FB actually posts what she calls “middle class baby led weaning” along with a photo of her child eating some fancy dish. I had to stop following her as my eyes rolled so far back in my head! It is all “performance” now for a lot of people.

I mean people can do what they want. But what I don’t like is how then women are feeling distressed if things aren’t going as well as all these videos portray. The basics of having a baby are fed, clean, loved. If you’ve got that covered, the rest is all (mostly unnecessary) extras.

I called it “he fell asleep on me” and I used to love it.

One of the absolute worst things on MN is the older women who come on to threads like this to pompously proclaim that they never had specific terms for perfectly normal things and that to do so must be performance or competitive parenting or “for instagram”. Oh fuck off, it’s just a short hand way to explain something that everyone understands.

The term “play date” is actually really useful because it’s clear what it is. What’s the alternative, you say “come over to my house with your child and they can play with toys while we drink tea”. How is that better than just having a word for it?!

Ditto stuff to make life easier - the sneering on another thread yesterday about buggy boards was ridiculous.

Given that motherhood is difficult enough it really irritates me when women come on these threads to tell us how they raised their children without this stuff as though it’s somehow better. It isn’t. You’re not better parents or better people.

Science progresses, the research on skin to skin is very interesting and I suspect if your child was born prem andwas in NICU you would have listened to the most up-to-ddate advice.

If things went well for you it is easy to be dismissive. When a baby is ill you take more interest in latest developments/research/thinking.

Yanbu

In my world this is just described as "baby napping on me" or "baby fell asleep on me".

The skin to skin thing in NICU is kinda about temperature regulation. I'm not sure it applies in the same way when babies get a bit older and are ok temperature wise at normal room temp. I mean sure its nice feeling their soft skin but i don't think a load of mutual nudity is necessarily biologically necessary for bonding with a full term healthy baby.

I've heard a lot of pretentious nonsense to do with parenting but this isn't it.

I like the phrase contact nap.

There's nothing about it which suggests it's good or bad, just shorter than saying or typing ''baby went to sleep in my arms and stayed on me till they woke''.

Skin to skin has benefits for all babies e.g. bwc.nhs.uk/skin-to-skin

Think this about sums it up 😂😂😂

I'm assuming if you post a photo of yourself on social media, you're inviting comment?

This made me laugh. My DS contact napped until 8 months old, and it was just that. Contact NAPS. He slept in his babybay at night, I slept fine and didn't suffer from awful sleep deprivation.

New terminology crops up all the time. A pp mentioned ‘playdate’ - never had that term when my children were little. They just had friends round to play. ‘Window on my calendar’ = a free day. Similarly ‘deep clean’. What the heck is that? I have always just ‘cleaned’. Does that mean I only cleaned ‘shallowly’? Took off the top layer? Madness!! ‘Pan fried’, that’s just a pretentious one, because ‘fried’ sounds unhealthy. These new terms make everyday things sound different/special/posher, in some way.
I actually think ‘contact nap’ sounds absolutely perfect, quite lovely in fact, and is certainly more succinct than saying ‘baby’s gone to sleep on me’.

Currently nap trapped reading this 🙈

Or maybe she’s just bored out of her mind with a baby asleep on her and a post on sm kills some time and shares a nice moment

This

Well put.

I mean yeah, that’s very much the context I used it in.
DD didn’t nap unless she was pressed against me or in a moving car until … well she still doesn’t and she’s 2 years and 4 months. She still needs cuddling to sleep at night. There is NO way to get this child to sleep that doesn’t involve driving her around or holding her very close - unless you’re our childminder who apparently just tells her it’s nap time now and that works. But nobody else has ever managed it.

So I probably did talk about her being a contact napper (or velcro baby), it was a term I’d heard a lot so I thought it was just what it was called? Didn’t realise I was being performative about it. If anything it was more a justification for the fact I wasn’t using these fabled ‘nap times’ with her in the cot to do housework or ‘self-care’ or whatever. I did watch a lot of Netflix though.

Evidence?

The person who wrote the post the OP is quoting doesn't think contact naps are bad, so we can assume she's not part of 'the sleep training industry'.