Does baby need to learn to “self settle” to stop catnapping?

[Moonshine160]

5 month old has been only catnapping since they were 3 months old. It was fine until now, but he’s now tired and irritable when he wakes up from the nap but won’t sleep longer than 30 minutes unless held. He only catnaps if he sleeps in the pram/car/crib/carrier. He can’t self settle and has to be rocked or fed to sleep.
Will his naps naturally lengthen with time or will this only happen if he learns to self settle? Are there any parents out there who rock or feed their baby to sleep and they take a longer nap?

30 minutes is a sleep cycle. It’s an ok length for a nap. The wake window is more important than the length of the nap.
Naps get longer when they fall asleep on their own but you’re too early for sleep training.

When they need such frequent naps and have such short wake windows, the naps will be more frequent but be much shorter..

When they drop to one or two naps, they will start to lengthen.

They can only sleep so much within 24 hours

Thank you. I don’t plan on sleep training, I am more than happy to continue cuddling or feeding to sleep, but I’ve noticed he’s starting to transition from 4 to 3 naps which means bedtime is shifting earlier as he is so overtired. 3 x 30-40 minute naps isn’t enough but it’s getting too difficult to squeeze a fourth nap in because his wake windows are getting longer. But his naps aren’t! 😫

This will happen every time they drop a nap and you just have to struggle through for a week and they quickly adjust

We're now going through the dropping a nap stage and bed time has been 5pm some nights 😬

@Moonshine160 just curious as i have a 3 month old who i also rock to sleep everytime and same issue with naps but not sure if he’s going through 4 month sleep regression as he wakes pretty much every hour at night now too as he’s needing to be rocked back to sleep - is this an issue you had or no? not sure whether the rocking is the issue as when he wakes he needs to be rocked to get back to sleep as he can’t self settle yet, really not sure what to do but the 8-9 night wakings are really starting to get to me exhaustion wise😅

@chloejoy hiya :) my DS is nearly 11 months old now. His naps are hit and miss, he has two a day but usually one of those is a long nap, around 1 hour 20 mins. I never know if it’s going to be the morning nap or afternoon nap 🥲 The other one is still a cat nap. Sometimes he “self settles” and sometimes he is fed or rocked to sleep, how he falls to sleep has no effect on whether it’s going to be a long or short nap. Hope this helps x

Hi! My DD2 is now 13 months old and was an absolutely “awful sleeper”. She would wake the second she wasn’t being held by me and would only ever manage 30 mins max too when I eventually got her to nap in her cot. I recommend following a lady called Lyndsey Hookway if you are on instagram, she talks about “normal” baby sleep and how a low of the things we think are bad are complete myths. She says cat naps until 6 months minimum are completely normal and still very restorative for baby. And that babies sleep longer when they need to. From about 9 months old, my baby began doing 2 long naps per day (this slowly increased from 6 months onwards). We’ve just dropped her down to one nap and she sleeps for 2.5 hours and I always have to wake her up! Also, no self settling has ever happened, she always feeds to sleep so it has absolutely nothing to do with length of naps. Hope that offers some reassurance, when your baby is ready for longer naps, they will happen ☺️

My LO is 6 months today and since he was 8 weeks old he has been absolutely worst when it came to sleeping. He used to not be fussy but would not sleep at all. And that was when I came to know all about sleep patterns in babies. He has been a chronic cat napper since he was 8weeks old and maybe just once or twice he would have a long stretch of sleep. He used to sleep alright at night. Frustrated with his cat naps I was trying to extend his naps for the last month but I was mostly unsuccessful even after rocking for half an hour or more. Last 2 weeks I struggled with his nights sleep and day naps and I had multiple break downs that’s when i started his naps on the bed with me where I would rest for some time. He would start wiggling just on the mark of 30 minutes then I would immediately start patting his butt and he felt asleep. I don’t know if this was the reason or putting him in our bee for the naps. But suddenly his 2 naps have extended to 1.5 hours each. It has been 3 days and it’s the same.
I have tried gentle sleep training but failed miserably. It’s lame to say that when I stopped stressing about it, it just worked, but honestly I would like to believe it.