A lot is happening in your baby’s life, around 12 months. They may be crawling or already walking. They’re probably experimenting with words, and language acquisition is a big part of your baby’s development at the moment.
Due to the physical development and mental growth your baby is experiencing, they may temporarily stop taking one or both of their naps. At this point, most parents will assume that their baby no longer needs a morning nap and drop it. You’ll notice that for a week or so your baby seems to thrive and function well without the nap. And then, disaster hits – bedtime struggles, overnight wakes and early mornings start to emerge. The vast majority of babies need two naps until they’re closer to 15-18 months of age. These two naps are important as they help your baby to process their daily input and learning.
How to resolve the nap strike?
1. Be Consistent and Persistent. Instead of prematurely dropping to one nap, continue to offer two naps around 9:30am and 1pm. The 9:30am nap can be capped at 15 - 30mins. It’s entirely acceptable if your baby plays or whinges in their cot for 20mins – 30mins, but doesn’t sleep. Be consistent with putting them down for this nap time even if they don’t sleep for a few weeks.
2. Don’t lengthen the morning nap. Sometimes parents will lengthen the morning nap in order to rectify the skipping of naps. However, a long morning nap results in a higher chance that your baby will skip their lunch nap. This then results in a very long wake time between the end of the morning nap and bedtime. This will create a sleep debt that will build up overtime and result in early evening wakes and early morning wakes.
3. Offer an early bedtime. To avoid your baby becoming extremely overtired, move bedtime earlier on the days where your child isn’t napping well (or at all). An earlier bedtime will allow your child to catch up on missed sleep and will help avoid accumulating sleep debt. This may mean that you’re laying your 12mth old down for bed at 6pm.
This is exactly what I have done with my 13mth old that decided to nap strike his morning nap the last 2 weeks. Now? He’s back to napping for 30mins at 9:30am everyday. Why? Because I was consistent, I knew from experience and study that he still needed this nap and because I understood that this was simply an age appropriate nap strike. Also, I’ve seen this multiple times with clients :)
If you’re baby is around 11 – 13months of age and starts a strike on the morning nap – now you know why.
Persevere and be consistent mumma! 1 - 2 weeks later, your baby will be having that morning nap again!
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