When do they start having longer day time naps?

[Sunflower100]

DD2 (11 weeks) sleeps happily in her moses basket and sleeps well at night, goes down happily but only naps for about 40 minutes. Would love her to have fewer longer naps. Is there anything I can do to make this happen?

Try putting her down earlier? There's a school of thought that says that babies sleep longer, and better, if they are not overtired so you need to catch them when they're sleepy but not knackered.

40 mins is a typical baby sleep cycle. DS had loads of 40 mins naps when he was a baby - you could set your watch by him! When he went from 3 to 2 naps at around 7 months old the naps tended to be longer, around an hour to 2 hours, then when he went from 2 to 1 nap at around 11 months that nap got longer still so he has between 2-3 hours now (20 months)

I agree with HensMum - my DS was exactly the same and starting napping for longer at about 6-7 months. Some people say that if you go to them as soon as they start to stir, you might be able to hush them back to sleep, but this never worked for us!

There's a lot written in baby books about how anything less than an hour isn't a decent nap. Personally, I think that's nonsense and DS survived quite happily on 3-4 naps of 40 minutes for the first few months.

Sorry not to be more help...perhaps someone else will be along soon with better answers!

My ds would only ever nap for 30-40 minutes at a time when he was little and it really frustrated me because when he woke up he was still tired but I just couldn't resettle him, then he was ready for another nap soon after. The only way to get him to sleep longer was when pushing him in a pram - he'd still wake up but would go back to sleep pretty quickly. I also had him napping in his pram in the house, then as soon as he woke up crying I'd push it up and down and he'd go back to sleep, but sometimes he'd then wake every 10 minutes or so.

Then suddenly a couple of weeks ago he started to sleep for longer and now at nearly 6 months I often end up waking him from naps otherwise he'd sleep all day! I don't know whether it was his age or whether because we'd started weaning (on the advice of the health visitor) and he wasn't hungry.

Another thing that I started was a nap time routine - change nappy, into grobag, shut curtains, read short story, kiss on forehead and leave the room. At first it would take a few minutes for him to settle himself (I'd keep going back in every couple of minutes to comfort him and sit with him if he was really upset - mostly it was just mild complaining though) but now he is really good at taking himself off to sleep.