15 week old no nap routine

[Starry4321]

Hi all our 3.5 month baby is sleeping through the night (9pm - 9am) with a dream feed about 11pm and another feed at 6am.

During the day I don’t bother with a nap routine and just let him nap when he wants to. I do feel he gets really grumpy by early evening though. I’m now feeling like a terrible mum that I should be sectioning off part of his day for naps. The reason I don’t is that he fights naps so much I give up rocking him when he is fighting his nap for 20 mins as it’s physically very exhausting to rock and sway him. Plus he will wake the minute I put him down - he prefers to nap on me after feeding.

How important is a nap routine at this age?

Not at all important.
If you have a routine at this age it’s for your benefit really, not the baby’s (so you can plan the day).
My DS napping was extremely variable at that age so there would have been no point.

@DuploTrain thank you that makes me feel a lot better!

A 3.5 months the only routine we had was every Tuesday she slept and snacked for 6h in the afternoon.

I started to bring in a little bit of routine at 5 months. It was a strict routine but sometime mid morning she had a fed and a nap. After lunch she had a feed and we headed out for a 2h walk and nap. She had a feed and a nap before I had dinner. Rather than focusing on the clock I focused on find a bit of rhythm to the day. Try making a note of when he sleeps and whether he seemed sleepy or overtired. Assess every couple of weeks and you might start to find a good pattern to your days

As a mum of 2 children please don't beat yourself up and don't create unnecessary stress for both of you Your baby has no sense of time, children don't learn time until they are on average 7 years old. I never had routine with my babies. However I always insisted they roll out of bed by 8 am once they are older, even at the weekends. It's really paying off now when they are teenagers. To help your baby settle for the naps better try watching your baby's body language rather than the clock. The good advice I got when my children were babies is to watch for the first yarn. Then to make sure it's no more than 10 minutes between that first yarn and me settling them to sleep. This avoids baby getting in an overtired mode when they fight sleep. I hope it helps

Not important. As much as possible (less possible once you have older dc to get to school etc) I followed their lead and they all fell into their own routine, but only ds had one by around 15 weeks, and I didn't keep them rigidly if there was something else going on.

#1 was about 6 months when I realised she was in a routine. Not planned or chosen by me, but slept 8:30pm-8:30am, short morning nap (sometimes in a buggy) about 9:30/10am, then afternoon nap approximately 2pm-5pm.
#2 didn't do sleep well at all, but she did have her morning 40 minutes and afternoon 40 minutes at about the same time, but wasn't consistent until she was about 7/8 months.
#3 was fairly routine based from 2-3 months. I'm not sure whether that was because he had to work round school/preschool runs at 9am/12noon/3pm, or just he liked routine. He had a consistent morning sleep, and a shorter one in the buggy while I did the school run in the afternoon. If I didn't put him into the cot, he'd curl up on the floor and sleep, so it was entirely based round his choice.