How relevant are naps with night sleep?

Since my 16 months old twins do not sleep well at night I am trying to limit their afternnon nap to just an hour and a half ( without a morning nap) in order for them to be more tired at night and sleep better. The truth is that the first days of trying this, things were better at night but now I am not really sure any more. What do you believe regarding the relevancy btwn afternoon naps and night sleep? What have you seen?

 

my personal experience is that sleep begets sleep - the more they sleep, the more they'll sleep (and their sleep will be of a better quality). if your child reaches an overtired or exhausted state, then their body will start to release adrenaline in the assumption that they have to stay awake for survival purposes - at that point, it's almost impossible to fall asleep, or if they do fall asleep, to stay asleep. it's a bit of a vicious cycle. have you read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child? he explains it really well in there. i find we get the best night time sleep in our house when the girls have had at least a 2.5 - 3 hour afternoon nap. any less than that and i'm guaranteed at least one middle of the night waking.

other than the afternoon nap, what does your schedule look like? what time do your LOs go to bed? what time to they usually wake up? are they teething? sick? reaching a developmental milestone? has their sleep always been rough or is this a fairly new thing?

 

I put them at bed at 8.30 -9.00 and they wake up ( for good) at around 7 but they wake up many many times in between. This goes on for more than two months and they used to be better sleepers but Then they started seriously teething and then they had caught a cold and you know... One thing brings the other till they got used to waking up around 4 to 6 times each night...and then I tried to limit the time they nap since they napped for long hours( as being exhausted from the night) without being sure of the results!

 

I have found the same as Rachel, for my two, the better they napped during the day, the better they slept at night. I know teething and being ill can mess up night sleep. I am not sure what your bedtime, nap time routine is but I found that I had to start doing quiet time before nap and bedtime to ease my kids into the transition, so we have 30 minutes of low activity, no TV, nothing stimulating before bed and naptime.

 

I have to agree that within reason, sleep does beget sleep. (I mean, you're never going to have your kids sleep 20 hours a day...well, until they're teenagers maybe! :lol: ) I never limit napping or wake them early unless there are extenuating circumstances (the rare afternoon appointment perhaps). One day Jack napped for almost 4 hours!! :blink: He still went to bed at the same time and slept well all night.

HERE is an article from WebMD about the amount of sleep children typically need. All kids are different; some need more and some need less. The article says that 1-3 year olds need about 12-14 hours per day between naps and night time sleep. I'd say my guys are right in that range, with Jack needing more sleep than Nate. They nap anywhere from 1-3.5 hours and sleep from about 8:30-7:30 every night, usually getting about 10-11 hours of sleep at night.

 

I think 8:30-9:00 is too late for 16 month olds. My boys are 26 months and go to bed no later than 7:30 and sleep for a solid 11 1/2 - 12 hours. During the day they take a good 3 hour nap and some days 4 hours. Even when they take a 4 hour nap, they still go to bed at 7:30 without any issues.

My one son never wakes at night unless he is REALLY sick. My other son will wake but puts himself back to sleep within a minute or two.

 

I haven't read Health Sleep Habits Happy Child in a long time... but what I remember from it is the whole "sleep begets sleep" thing. but I think at some point you do have to limit naps to get night sleeping... but I cannot remember what he says on that.

how we went about it was that from pretty early we got 2 naps a day that were approx 2 hrs each. around 16 mo. if I remember they started playing for a long time before sleeping in their naps... so I started pushing the morning one from 9a to 10a and they still took 2 2hr naps, just pushed them about an hour and they still for the most part went to bed close to 7pm. Some days they'd do good with 1 nap but mostly it was 2 naps a day.

in December during their 20th month I did finally switch to 1 nap a day, because they kept waking at night... I think that they were getting too much daytime sleep with the 4 hrs of naps. they have settled into 1 3-hr nap and still go down around 7-7:30p, with waking after 7a.

I agree that thier current bedtime seems late, I believe that book talks about if you have waking issues, to just put them down earlier... if you haven't been trying the 1 nap a day for long, I wonder if they'd like 2 naps still??

good luck, sleep is such a tender issue, and it seems when you get it down, something comes up! (I've got teething going on right now!)

 

it sounds to me like maybe because of teething & illness they started to loose sleep which probably initiated the night waking, which started to cause over-tiredness which continued & worsened the night waking, etc, etc. i would maybe try an earlier bedtime (if they usually wake around 7:00am, i would try a 7:00pm bedtime) and then let them sleep as long as they want for their nap. keep that up for about a week or so before reevaluating as it can take time to really see if it's helping or not. :hug: sleep issues suck! i hope they start sleeping again for you soon. :hug: