If you have not already done so, please read Blog Posts 1 through 5 that describe how sleep is important and beneficial. I will post specific information for parents and children based on my book, “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.” Please do not be put off by my book’s length. This is a reference book. Read only the topic of interest to you.
The Third Nap
Some babies take a third nap in the late afternoon. This nap, when it occurs, tends to be brief and irregular in timing. Other babies do not take it at all.
The third nap is handled differently from the midmorning and midday naps. It is a no-cry nap: if your baby cries upon being put down or shortly after, pick him up immediately. Do not attempt to extend it through soothing or ignoring.
The timing of the third nap matters for the bedtime. If your baby sleeps past 4:00pm from a third nap, you are likely to have difficulty achieving a bedtime that is in sync with his early night sleep rhythm. A third nap that starts after 3:00pm or runs too long will push the bedtime later — which triggers pre-sleep arousal, which fragments night sleep, which impairs the next day’s naps. The cycle is familiar.
Why Naps Are Harder Than Night Sleep
Parents frequently ask why their baby sleeps reasonably well at night but cannot nap consistently during the day. Night sleep and daytime naps are regulated by overlapping but distinct biological systems, and the conditions that support them are not identical.
Three factors determine nap quality: the strength and timing of the biological nap rhythm, the quality of the night sleep that precedes the nap, and the timing of the nap opportunity relative to the child’s biological rhythm at that moment. When any one of these is off — when the rhythm is weak, the night was fragmented, or the nap opportunity arrived too early or too late — the nap suffers.
This is why fixing night sleep often improves naps, sometimes without any direct intervention. Night sleep lays the neurological foundation for the midmorning nap. The midmorning nap lays the foundation for the midday nap. The architecture builds from the bottom up, and disruption at any level propagates upward.
Practical Points
A few observations from clinical experience and from the many parent accounts on this blog:
The nap drill sometimes fails on the first attempt and succeeds several days later. Nap rhythms in babies younger than 6 months are still maturing, and what fails at 4 months may work at 5. There is no harm in attempting the drill for a few days, pausing if it is not working, and returning to it after a week or two.
When the nap drill fails consistently despite correct implementation — correct timing, dark and quiet environment, drowsy-but-awake placement, good night sleep — the most common cause is a bedtime that is still too late. Cumulative sleepiness from insufficient night sleep raises the neurological arousal level during the day, making it harder for the nap rhythm to assert itself against the background of chronic overtiredness. The solution, in these cases, usually requires addressing the bedtime before the nap drill can succeed.
Contact naps — napping in someone’s arms or in a carrier — are not wrong. But they are a choice with a trajectory. A baby who naps only in contact will not spontaneously transition to crib napping. If contact napping works for your family and you are willing to continue it for as long as it persists, do so consistently. If you would prefer crib napping, begin it consistently from the start. Start as you mean to go.
Finally: the nap drill is one of the more demanding aspects of helping a young child sleep well. It requires attention to timing, tolerance for crying that is briefer and less predictable than nighttime crying, and the willingness to structure the day around nap windows that are easy to miss. It is worth the effort. A child who naps well is easier to soothe to sleep at night, wakes less often, and wakes happier. The nap is not a break in the day. It is when the morning’s learning consolidates, the nervous system recovers, and the foundation for the next night’s sleep is laid.
A Parent’s Report: Sam
Here is how one family implemented the nap drill and extinction together at 7 months, with their results reported day by day.
My recommendation to this mother: start on Friday with a super-early bedtime of 5:30pm, do extinction or graduated extinction for night sleep, and do the nap drill with your husband available for weekend support. Report back on Monday.
“My son’s sleep has SIGNIFICANTLY improved. He’s been logging an extra 3 to 4 hours of sleep in a day. Here’s what my husband and I did:
We decided to do extinction with a 45-minute cap because our son has always been Mr. Sir Poops-A-Lot. We wanted to be able to check his diapers, and we thought that graduated extinction was too much to keep track of. We also moved his bedtime up by 30 minutes and agreed on a nursing schedule — baby can eat every four hours at night if he chooses. Only Dad goes in for diaper and hunger checks. Mom goes in for a feed if the baby is really hungry. 100% of the time since Friday we have put the boy down drowsy but awake and left the room for him to soothe himself to sleep.
Day 1, Friday: Sam cries for 45 minutes. My husband goes in and does a diaper check — it’s a code brown. Husband changes the diaper and reports back to me. He’s ready to call it quits on day one because he doesn’t want our son to get a massive diaper rash. As he’s talking, Baby Sam falls asleep and proceeds to sleep for 8 hours straight for the first time in his life. Husband recommits!
I give him one feed — baby is definitely eating, not comfort eating. I put him down awake and leave the room. He cries for 15 minutes and then sleeps another 4 hours.
Day 2, Saturday: Nap 1: Baby cries for 20 minutes then sleeps for 30 minutes. Woke up from a bowel movement. Rotten luck for the kid. Nap 2: Baby cries for 20 minutes then sleeps for 2 hours! Nap 3: Cries for 15 minutes then sleeps for 30 minutes. Night: Baby cries for 40 minutes then sleeps until 2am. I give him one feed. I put him down awake and leave the room. Baby wakes at 4am then falls back asleep after 15 minutes of crying. Sleeps until 6:30am.
Day 3, Sunday: Nap 1: Cries the whole hour. No nap. Nap 2: Cries 30 minutes then falls asleep for an hour. Nap 3: Cries 15 minutes and sleeps 45 minutes. Night: Cries 20 minutes then falls asleep until 2am. I give him one feed. I put him down awake and leave the room. Baby wakes at 4am and cries for 30 minutes then falls back asleep. Mom gets eight hours of sleep for the first time in 7 months.
Day 4: Baby Sam is napping. Peacefully. On his own.
My son is in the 96th percentile for height. His favorite way to sleep was for me — his short mom — to carry him around the room until he passed out. He’s now too big to carry. We needed a sleep solution. This book’s advice improved my son’s sleep and saved my back!”
Several things in Sam’s account are worth noting.
The father’s full involvement was not incidental — it was structural. He handled diaper and hunger checks through the night, which meant the mother’s presence, her smell, and her nursing were not available as sleep cues at 2am or 4am. When the mother did go in, it was for a genuine feeding, not for soothing. The roles were clear, agreed upon in advance, and maintained consistently.
The 45-minute cap on extinction was a practical adaptation to a real concern — a baby with frequent bowel movements who needed checking. The cap allowed the parents to verify that crying was not from discomfort while still giving Sam the opportunity to settle independently before the check occurred. When the check happened on night one and Sam fell asleep immediately after, it demonstrated that the crying had been protest, not pain.
Day 3, Sunday, produced a setback — no midmorning nap, and more crying at other naps than on Saturday. This is typical and expected. Progress in sleep training is rarely linear. The parents stayed the course, and by day 4 Sam was napping independently.
The gain — 3 to 4 additional hours of sleep per day — is not unusual when a bedtime is moved earlier and the nap drill is implemented correctly at the same time. Night sleep and nap sleep reinforce each other. When both improve together, the total gain can be larger than either improvement would produce alone.
— Marc Weissbluth, M.D.
