Nap times for four month old - is this normal ?

[Gardengnome82]

Hi all

I'm a first time parent so seeking a bit of advice regarding the minefield that is napping. My LO is four months, currently in middle of leap 4 and waking hourly at night. He contact naps during day and has a two hour wake window.

I'm thinking ahead to five or six months when we might sleep train if things don't improve ( he has never been a good sleeper, we never got the longer stretches of say five hours). We have a kind of bed routine of bath, sleeping bag, read,feed, sleep but as he can nap any time from 30 mins to two hours, his evening routine is a bit all over the place in terms of when it happens. Will this impriove on its own? At the mo, we bath at 6.30 even if he won't be ready for sleep until say 8 (because he woke from nap at 6) and then have him downstairs with us until twenty mins ish before he will go down. Then I take him up, read then feed.

Should I change things up or is he still too young to be worrying about this too much?

Thanks all!

Are you feeding him to sleep or is he going into bed awake?
I’ve got a 12 week old who contact naps and has/had a feed to sleep association that I’m working on breaking.
He’ll be waking if he’s gone to sleep on you and then woken up somewhere else. Also he’ll assume he needs food to go back to sleep.
I’ve been working hard on nights the last few days and I think I’m getting somewhere. Being very gentle as I don’t want to formally train him or upset him at all at this young age.
I’ve been obsessed doing a load of reading and a lot of the anti-sleep trainers say they just eventually get it and sleep on their own. Not sure how true that is, but it’s comforting!

Regarding bedtime routine, you are better working to awake time windows, rather than by-the-clock at this age. So have a fixed wake up time, but a flexible bedtime depending on when naps happn.

I suggest an awake window of around double nap length, give or take 15 minutes or so. So say you have a 90 minute awake time window then at any awake time that begins after 6pm, call that awake time window "bedtime" and do your routine. Say your usual bedtime routine (bath, into night clothes, feed, story, sleep) takes 1h, then start this 30 minutes into your awake window, whatever time that happens to be. But due to age and SIDS recommendations, instead of going "to bed"! (ie upstairs), going to sleep after bedtime routine involves another sleep in the place where daytime sleeps happen downstairs.

So if baby wakes from the last nap at 7pm, then bedtime will be 8.30pm (with bath/bed routine starting at 7.30pm). If baby wakes from last nap at 6.00pm then bedtime will be 7.30pm (with bath/bed routine starting at 6.30pm, and so on.

@ELW85

Are you feeding him to sleep or is he going into bed awake? I’ve got a 12 week old who contact naps and has/had a feed to sleep association that I’m working on breaking. He’ll be waking if he’s gone to sleep on you and then woken up somewhere else. Also he’ll assume he needs food to go back to sleep. I’ve been working hard on nights the last few days and I think I’m getting somewhere. Being very gentle as I don’t want to formally train him or upset him at all at this young age. I’ve been obsessed doing a load of reading and a lot of the anti-sleep trainers say they just eventually get it and sleep on their own. Not sure how true that is, but it’s comforting!

Feeding to sleep! He is a super alert baby so never seems to get to that 'drowsy' state where I can put him down. Like you, I'm working on it but it's hard work isn't it?

@BabySleepTeacherUK

Regarding bedtime routine, you are better working to awake time windows, rather than by-the-clock at this age. So have a fixed wake up time, but a flexible bedtime depending on when naps happn.

I suggest an awake window of around double nap length, give or take 15 minutes or so. So say you have a 90 minute awake time window then at any awake time that begins after 6pm, call that awake time window "bedtime" and do your routine. Say your usual bedtime routine (bath, into night clothes, feed, story, sleep) takes 1h, then start this 30 minutes into your awake window, whatever time that happens to be. But due to age and SIDS recommendations, instead of going "to bed"! (ie upstairs), going to sleep after bedtime routine involves another sleep in the place where daytime sleeps happen downstairs.

So if baby wakes from the last nap at 7pm, then bedtime will be 8.30pm (with bath/bed routine starting at 7.30pm). If baby wakes from last nap at 6.00pm then bedtime will be 7.30pm (with bath/bed routine starting at 6.30pm, and so on.

Thanks for this I am using wake window (his is two hours) but he naps for all different nap times which throws things off. Was wondering if there was such a thing as too much day sleep. I am putting him to bed upstairs with camera on alone for an hour as feel SIDS risk is v low after reading the studies on which that advice is based. Have volume do high from camera anyway that I can hear him breathing!

Babies cannot have too much sleep. In exactly the same way that baby cannot have too much milk.

More sleep is always, always better. Its not until well into the toddler years that you might consider strategically restricting daytime sleep. You're about 18m away from that, so do not even consider restricting daytime sleep now.

You mention a 2h awake window alongside the fact that nap lengths vary. You could do with being more flexible in awake windows. While 2h awake might be tolerable after a 1h plus long nap, if you've had a day of mostly 30 minute naps then you would just be perpetuating over tiredness keeping baby awake so long. 1h awake time us more appropriate for short (30 min) naps.

@BabySleepTeacherUK

Babies cannot have too much sleep. In exactly the same way that baby cannot have too much milk.

More sleep is always, always better. Its not until well into the toddler years that you might consider strategically restricting daytime sleep. You're about 18m away from that, so do not even consider restricting daytime sleep now.

You mention a 2h awake window alongside the fact that nap lengths vary. You could do with being more flexible in awake windows. While 2h awake might be tolerable after a 1h plus long nap, if you've had a day of mostly 30 minute naps then you would just be perpetuating over tiredness keeping baby awake so long. 1h awake time us more appropriate for short (30 min) naps.

Thank you that helps. I’m always lead by him and the wake window is what he chooses. He is just super alert! Won’t go down even though it’s clear he needs to sleep. Perhaps this will come when he can self settle.

I’m always lead by him and the wake window is what he chooses. He is just super alert! Won’t go down even though it’s clear he needs to sleep

Trying to be gentle in saying this - but you know better than your baby.

The fact that you know baby needs to sleep means that... baby needs to sleep (in fact probably needed to be asleep half an hour before you realised it).

Babies need active help to get to sleep. But they cannot communicate that to you. Baby not going to sleep easily does not mean baby doesn't nedd/want to sleep - in fact the opposite is usually true.

Their only way of communicating is crying or being fussy/clingy. So "listen" to that communication. Any time that baby is not happy just to be left alone, on the play at having a kick around means that baby is either (a) hungry or (b) tired. So any amount of crying, waking to be held, grumbling - all of that means baby wants to go to sleep or be fed.

I somewhat disagree with the "babies can't have too much sleep" mentality. I also have a 4 month old who, until a few weeks ago, was also waking every 45 mins to hourly at night. She used to have some much longer naps (3-4 hours) in the day and on the advice of many I followed the "let sleeping babies sleep" mentality, and tbh I also needed this time to nap myself. However after reaching breaking point and doing a lot of reading/research I decided to try capping any single day time nap at 2 hours as realised sleep was impacting on calorie intake in the day. Since doing that we now get an initial block of 4-6 hours at night, and then waking every 3 hours, although daytime naps are now more of a challenge.

You know your baby best but I do feel there isn't a one size fits all approach. If there's a chance that your baby's daytime sleep might be impacting on their calorie intake during the day (and therefore meaning they need to feed more at night) it might be worth reconsidering sleep.

Honestly? For me 4 months is so young. I will probably start some kind of routine by 5 months and I'll be led by my baby to some extent, in terms of creating a routine.