18 month old awake til nearly 10pm

[wishing3]

Hey, my 18 month old wakes around 7.30 usually (sometimes a bit later) but has started not wanting a nap til really late. Yesterday she didn’t sleep until 4pm(I wasn’t forcing her,she was just in pushchair and nodded off). I’d say nap start time ranges from2.20 til 3.30 usually and we tend to make sure she doesn’t sleep past 4. She’s then awake til 9.30/45. This is now fairly consistent regardless of if she woke up at 3 ish or 4 from her nap. She still needs a nap. Any tips? This the same for anyone? Do t like the idea of bedtime getting even later before she drops the nap. 😬

Cap the nap to 15min or power her through and put her to bed at 6? Pick one and do it for at least a week.

Hmmm, interesting ta. 15 minutes would make her really sad when she woke up. Powering through would make for a better mood but she usually has one day time breastfeed at about 5 and if not napped will nod off during. Hard to dissuade her from it. Bed at 5 seems so early!

So push the breastfeed til 6?

Oh the lovely inbetween stage of refusing to nap at lunchtime when they actually really need to but can’t quite get through to bedtime…

DD1 started fighting her nap around 18 months. I used to have decide whether to let her have a nap late in the day or pull her through on no nap. If she had a nap, there was no chance of her going to bed before 9pm but if she didn’t nap, she would crash out to sleep by 7pm so I’d have an evening to myself but she would be absolutely horrendous the last few hours of the day…

i think you need to decide as above I’m afraid… mine had dropped her nap by the time she turned 2…

My 20mo DD wakes at 5.30am and goes to bed at 8pm. Has a 1.5-2 hour nap around 11/12 ish. She's been doing this for a few months. I wish I could get her to sleep longer at night but nothing has made a difference. She often seems quite tired and grouchy too.

As someone above said, you're in the transition stage. Sorry to say your child will be one of the ones that drops their nap before 2, as ours did. But you will have another few months of late naps and late bedtimes in the meantime. However there's light at the end of the tunnel, once mine dropped the nap at 22 months, they started sleeping 7.30am - 7.30pm fairly consistently.

I also have an 18 month old DD. We dropped the nap a month ago because of what you've described. Generally up from 6am to 7pm now. Sleeps through no problem. We power through with activities as an antidote to any grouchiness. It's going really well and I'm delighted to have reclaimed my evenings for the first time since 2020.

My youngest dropped naps at 18 months.

Eldest was at nursery and pick up times made a lunch time nap hard. I went out to work at 4pm and drove 20 mins to drop the kids off witn family. I just let him cat nap in the car then. He pretty much dropped it after a couple of weeks. He did need an earlier bed time, closer to 6.30pm. But it worked. He always slept right through.

Similar here. He dropped his nap just before he turned2 last year snd sleeps 630-530/6.

Just have to power on through. It's tough

My 7 year old was so different, she would regularly do 2-3 hours and still sleep 12 hours at night. I had to force her to drop her nap at 4.5! Even now she loves her bed.

I'm hoping the 3 year old starts sleeping better. It's knackering, he started the day at 430 today because he needed a poo, going to be a long day......