10 month old still having 3 naps

[trrk]

Is it normal for a 10 month old to still be having 3 naps? Most of her naps are still 30 min or so and her wake windows are fairly short (2-3 hr) so she normally needs a 3rd nap to get through to dinner and bed. We have recently started having most naps in the cot or pram as opposed to contact naps but she rarely sleeps longer than 30 min in the cot during the day despite doing 10-12 hours in the cot most nights. We have the odd 2 nap day if she has a longer nap (usually only in the pram at the moment). Should I just leave it as she’s mostly happy and sleeping well at night? It just seems so many naps compared to other babies her age.

at this age I'd say it's time to start the transition to one short nap in the morning and one longer one at midday. Try this by keeping them occupied in the afternoon until bedtime, eventually it will stick.

Probably the naps would extend if you dropped to two. But it sounds like she sleeps through? Could be that increasing day time sleep by having 2 much longer naps could mean she isn't the right amount of tired to sleep so well at night? I wouldn't change anything! Eventually she'll drop to two naps anyway on her own.

My (just) 12 month old is still on 3 naps a lot of the time, we try to have a 2 nap day and in the last couple of weeks she has started extending her naps to 1-1.5 hours by herself when she’s in the cot, but it’s impossible to keep her awake on the way back from nursery most of the time so she has a 3rd nap on these days and a later bedtime at about 9pm, which works for us.
When she’s at home with us she has more 2 nap days but I’m hoping she’ll have 2 nap days at nursery soon as her early afternoon nap there is getting longer.

I think unless it’s a problem for you & your baby then I wouldn’t change anything, so much of this is developmental meaning we can’t rush it, and her naps will change as she gets older. I never thought my baby would regularly nap for an hour or over (previous 28 min napper here) but she is and we haven’t done anything to encourage that.

Thanks all for the reassurance! Nice to hear there is hope for some longer naps in the future. She has been doing mostly 30 min naps since 4 months old.

It is working for us at the moment so I’ll stick with it for now. On days when the 3rd nap is a bit late it does make bedtime a bit later too but she’s always down by 9pm (usually between 7:30-8:30). This actually suits us at the moment as we like to do a family dinner when DH gets home from work and he has some time to play with her in the evening. Not sure if it will still work when she starts nursery in 2 months and needs to be up earlier but lots might change before than.

@TashieWoo what time does your baby wake up if she goes to bed at 9pm? Does it work with nursery?

@trrk it works for us for the same reason too, I think it’s nice (and important) to have quality time together in the evening particularly when they’re away from you all day and feeling the effects of separation anxiety.

DD usually gets up between 6.30-7am so that’s fine for nursery, we WFH most of the time so she gets in for 8.30-9am.

If she's sleeping through the night and getting up at a reasonable time then nothing to worry about!