When do naps lengthen?

[Maisie2019]

DS is almost 6 months and is still stuck in 1 sleep cycle naps. He puts himself to sleep at night but can’t in the day (I’m guessing less sleep pressure?)

He is on 3 naps and has been for about 4 weeks and I was hoping this would lengthen them but alas nothing yet. Definitely cannot drop to 2 naps as his wake windows are 2.5 hours max.

He also cannot nap in his cot despite putting himself to sleep every night with no help (no dummy, no rocking etc) he screams and cries if I put him in the cot during the day. So we do pram naps with a dummy and I rock him to sleep. I watch over him from 30 mins and if he stirs I rock the pram again and half the time he goes back to sleep half the time he doesn’t. I’m assuming it’s a sleep association when he stirs between cycles he needs the pram rocking again cos that how he went to sleep.

Any tips for:

1. getting him to lengthen and connect cycles
2. cot naps? I honestly don’t mind that he naps in his pram but I think this is the cause of why he can’t connect the cycles

Mine is an awful sleeper but her naps began to lengthen at around 6/7 months and despite having to be fed to sleep and put in her cot she managed to transition to another sleep cycle and I didn’t do anything to make that happen because I’m honestly not sure you really can force that.

would he nap in his cot if you rocked him to sleep and then put him in his cot?

sleep is such a tough issue and every child is so different. When mine has less than an hour nap she wakes screaming because she’s still tired but if she has 1 - 1.5hrs she wakes chatting to herself. Does he seem like he actually needs longer naps or does he wake happy?

Mine definitely starting taking longer naps when she dropped to 2 naps which was around 6/7 months, at the time she wasn’t really ready because she had similar wake windows to your DS but she utterly refused the third nap so eventually I just had to force the longer wake window for two naps and it didn’t take her long to settle into that

1. Time. Sorry. DS inconsistently started doing one longer nap a day at about 8 months, consistently at about 10 months. Basically when he was moving a lot, could handle 2 naps and actually seemed physically more tired.
2. See above. The pram isn’t causing it, short naps are a rubbish but developmentally normal thing. Cot naps happened for us at about the same time as naps lengthening, so maybe 9-10 months. Before that it was all sling/car/pram/held.