16 month old broken naps

[d0288]

My DD is 16 months, she has been on 1 nap a day for the last two months. It was going well initially, sleeping average 2 hours, but for the last 3 weeks, she is averaging 1 hour. She seems to wake up in between cycles. Occasionally, we can get her back to sleep for another cycle, but most of the time too awake to go back down. The issue is that she is over tired and cranky for the rest of the afternoon and makes lock-down and juggling work for DW and myself very difficult.

She is up in the morning at 6AM, has lunch at 1130 and goes to bed at 7PM. We walk her in the pram to get to sleep for her nap and then transfer to cot and covered with a blanket. Her room is blacked out (90%), the house is quiet and she has white noise to help. She seems to get easily disturbed by noise recently.

She is an ok sleeper at night and goes down to sleep well, although it took a long time to train.

I've tried everything i know (full blackout, allowing some light, closing door, white noise), but none of it seems to work. We thought it was teething, but she doesn't seem to be teething heavily the last week and so don't think this is the problem.

Does anyone have suggestions what might be the issue or what could help her nap longer?

We walk her in the pram to get to sleep for her nap and then transfer to cot and covered with a blanket.

This is the problem.

The central, most important thing for good sleep hygiene (which allow her to resettle easily between sleep cycles) is that she goes to sleep where she stays asleep.

So she either needs to go from fully awake to fully asleep in the cot. Or let her go to sleep in the pram and stay there for the nap.

I might also point out that the average age to swap from 2-nap days to 1-nap days is 18months old. From what you describe I would additionally suggest your daughter is not yet ready for 1-nap days and would probably be less over tired and get better quality sleep if you let her have 2 naps. My daughter stayed on 2-nap days until 20-22 months old.

I might also point out that the average age to swap from 2-nap days to 1-nap days is 18months old.

Both mine dropped all day time naps completely at 18 months, so there must be a lot of variation in that statement!

My DD went from 3hr afternoon naps to no naps at all overnight - just stopped.

My DS began to resist day time naps from about 15 months, and dropped again by 18 months. He would have stopped earlier if I hadn't persevered, being pg with DD and needing a break. In the end I realised the effort of trying to get him to sleep was worse than no nap at all and gave in.

@FATEdestiny

We walk her in the pram to get to sleep for her nap and then transfer to cot and covered with a blanket.

This is the problem.

The central, most important thing for good sleep hygiene (which allow her to resettle easily between sleep cycles) is that she goes to sleep where she stays asleep.

So she either needs to go from fully awake to fully asleep in the cot. Or let her go to sleep in the pram and stay there for the nap.

I might also point out that the average age to swap from 2-nap days to 1-nap days is 18months old. From what you describe I would additionally suggest your daughter is not yet ready for 1-nap days and would probably be less over tired and get better quality sleep if you let her have 2 naps. My daughter stayed on 2-nap days until 20-22 months old.

That's an interesting thought. She was very resistant being put to bed, but now in the evenings she is great and minimal fuss, so maybe time to retrain her day time naps starting in the cot.

We definitely felt it was time for 1 nap per day, she put up a lot of resistance to 2 naps and ended up more sleep deprived. We also had to make the decision due to lockdown/working, it became unpractical to spend ages trying to get her to sleep just to get 30 mins plus a second failed sleep attempt.

Interestingly, we notice starts getting tired around 11, but she also gets hungry. We give her a lunch at 1130 and then she gets a second wind. This being the case, i find it difficult to see us putting her down at 11..