Afternoon naps and overnight sleeps

[KVG82]

Hi there, my 4 month old doesn't generally like to stay awake longer than 1.5-2 hrs in one stint (before getting grumpy, red eyes, yawning, sucking thumb and rubbing eyes). He will generally have 2 x 40 min naps in the am, a 1hr nap around late lunchtime but then at about 4pm can sleep up to 2hrs. His bedtime is 7pm but he doesn't sleep through, waking between 2-3 times, and then waking for the day between 0530-0630. Could his long, late afternoon nap be a factor in overnight sleep? Should I be letting him nap as he wants or waking him? Grateful for any thoughts or advice.

To be honest that sounds great for a 5 month old. While I know you say he wakes 2-3 times 7pm-6.am is great.

I would say awake time being too long is a factor. Physical tired signs (eye running, yawning etc) are actually over-tired signs, baby was probably tired at least 30 minutes earlier.

The trick is to learn baby's awake times so that you can anticipate a nap before baby shows you he's tired, then get him to sleep just at the very beginnings of being tired.

I view anything other than awake/happy as tired. So the very moment baby grumbles, it's nap time.

At four weeks old I would expect awake times of 40-80 minutes and naps if 30-60 minutes.

So, for example, if the last nap was short (only around half an hour) I'd be anticipating awake time on the short side, not far over half an hour. If the last nap was long (an hour or more) I'd do the shopping expect a decent awake time of at least an hour, maybe 1h20m.

Hi there, my 4 month old doesn't generally like to stay awake longer than 1.5-2 hrs in one stint

Read up on sleep on patterns, this is totally normal.

It's also quite normal for a 4 month old to still wake up 2-3 times in the night as well.

You could try cluster feeding, but I can't guarantee that will work. If he's FF, try upping his feeds during the day, you might find he sleeps longer at night.

"At four weeks months old..."

Thanks all, I've done that dangerous thing of speaking to NCT friends, all of whom have children that stay awake far longer and nap far less which made me worry he was sleeping too much! The trouble at the moment is he really fights naps so getting him down is tricky.... but that's a whole other issue. Thank you for the reassuring advice.