Does your 3 yo nap?

[happy2bamom]

The last two days have been such a headache at naptime. Yesterday my DS cried for 1/2 hour, then ran around the room and called my name for another 45 minutes. He finally fell asleep and took a 2 hour nap. Today was about the same, but without the crying and without the nap. I'm desperately hoping that this doesn't mean that our daily naps are over. What do you all think? We have a similar experience at bedtime, in that DS will sit in his room and talk for 45 minutes before going to sleep (regardless of what time we put him to bed). To add to my sleep deprivation, DS is ALWAYS awake by 6:30 am, sometimes as early as 5:30 (regardless of what time he goes to bed). What do you think: forego naps altogether, keep trying to put him down for a nap, transition into quiet time in his room, etc????

I need some suggestions (mostly I need sleep) :)
TIA
Kelli

[hbridge]

Nope! We lost the nap at about 2yrs 7months. I pushed it for a while and realized that on the days we had a successful nap, bedtimes were about 10pm. So we stopped even trying. I tried quiet time for awhile, but now we generally do an activity or have school after lunch. It was, however, a really tough transition. Best of luck.

[SnuggleBuggles]

My 3yo napped most of the time for at least the first half of the year. By the midpoint naps were fewer between. He napped again around his 4th b-day when it was really hot. They go through nap phases so don't give up. :)

Definetly keep up with quiet time in his room if you can. Him- and you :)- probably need some down time.

And maybe while he is up there he will fall asleep!

Beth

ETA- my friend's ds still naps and he is 4y5m. He wakes up at 5:30-6am so by 2-2:30 he is ready for a nap!

[TraciG]

I think I will cry when Sydney doesn't nap anymore ! She is 3 years old & 4 months & naps an hour and a half to 2 hours NO PROBLEM !

GOOD LUCK

[JBaxter]

LOL 3 yr old nap.... its been a LONG time. When the rare nap occurs it pushes bedtime from 830ish to 11:00 and so I would RATHER him not nap.

[KrisM]

Same here. We dropped DS's nap at 2 years 8 months because he was up until 10:30pm and up at 6am. With no nap, he's asleep by 7:30 most nights and sleeps until 7 am. As much as I miss the afternoon time, I much prefer my nights!

[lizajane]

almost the same here. schuyler is almost 4. he hasn't napped for over a year because he was awake until 10pm after a nap and still up at 6-7am, often earlier. dh made me take the nap away. i think it was a huge mistake. we are now being counseled to reinstate a nap. um, yeah. you tell him to take a nap now that he hasn't for over a year. frankly, it is awful. he is exhausted every morning. he is exhausted every afternoon. while he does go straight to bed at 7pm, dh often doesn't get around to bedtime until later, so he gets wired, so he needs an hour to go to sleep. and i mean and hour of lying down next to him. he WILL NOT GO TO SLEEP ON HIS OWN. ever. at all. zero.

[o_mom]

I think we are done at 3.5 yrs. He just fights it so much so maybe once a week he will actaully nap. I think he still needs it as he is dead tired by 7pm and has trouble holding it together. Problem is that even if I think he will nap, chances are he will spend an hour banging the wall or getting up to potty 5 times and in the process manage to wake his brother. It became a matter of who needed the nap more and the younger one wins. We did have about three months where he would nap every other day so you may try that as a transition.

[CiderLogan]

My DD started skipping naps a few months after she turned 3. Now it's a rare, rare occasion when she does nap, which I prefer because otherwise she's up really late (she stays in her bed well at night, but she does call us a lot). I give her "quiet time"/"rest time" every day while her baby sister naps, and occasionally she does sleep, but mostly she just plays in her room. I figure we all need the break! The hard part is keeping her quiet enough so that the baby can nap... it makes me so upset when DD1 wakes up poor DD2.

I say keep the naptime, but give it a different name and let it be ok if he reads/plays quietly as long as he stays in his room. Encourage sleeping, though!

Also, just to warn you, my DD went through a rough period discipline-wise that happened to coincide with the nap-dropping; I think it was her way of adjusting to less sleep (and often because she was overtired at night - she was not tired enough to nap but too tired to really make it to her normal bedtime - we did move up her bedtime a little for a bit).

OTOH, I have a friend whose 4.5 year old still takes daily naps!

Jenny
Julia, 8/03
Clara, 5/06

[lmintzer]

Joshua's starting to drop it at 3 years and 3 months. I could cry! He used to sleep up to 3 hours an afternoon. He's a pretty intense kiddo lately, so I really needed the break. Now he's fighting it, and last week, skipped 3 days in a row. He was so so crabby. It'd be one thing if he were really ready to let it go, but he's clearly not.

Jack napped reliably until 4, and then was doing every other day. Beginning at 5, we turned "nap" into "book rest" which has morphed into "quiet play on his bed". We do this for an hour to an hour and 15 mins. every day he doesn't have Extended Day after Kindergarten. This is as much for me as for him, but he still benefits, as he doesn't sleep quite enough at night (he's an early riser!).

[hez]

He skips a couple a week. We still do quiet time on those days. Some weeks I don't think naps are long for this world, some weeks I think we may get to keep them for a while. I may post in a week that we're done. I have no idea at this point.

No good BTDT on the end stage of naps yet-- just hope that the transition is easy on you both if that's what's in your immediate future!

[Emmas Mom]

We've been playing around with this lately & I've decided that our older DD still needs them. We've skipped them 3 days this week & she's dozed off in the car all 3 days. She's also a little monster towards the later afternoon/early evening. On days when she naps she'll sleep around 1 - 1 1/2 hours & then falls asleep around 9:00 pm & then sleeps until around 7:00 am. On days when she doesn't nap she's been asleep by 8:30 but I think she's so tired she's fighting it too much & I really don't like how overtired she has been. Regardless, she's waking up around 7:00 am. So....I think she still does better when she naps & at this age I think she needs as much sleep as she can get. Good luck, gotta love trying to figure out what works for your DC! :)

[matthewsmom]

My 3 1/2 year old DS still naps most days. It takes him awhile sometimes though. For a while it would take him 1 hour to fall asleep. Then he would take a 1 1/2 -2 hour nap. But then for nighttime, he doesn't fall asleep till 9:30 -10pm even though we put him down by 8:30pm. I really hope he doesn't drop the nap too soon. Even if he does, I'll still have him do quiet time in his room. He has been doing fine with reading in his room for a bit. I found that on days when he doesn't nap, he will fall asleep right away at 8pm but then will wake up after 45minutes crying. He has a lot of interrupted sleep when he doesn't nap. That is why I still try to keep him on a nap schedule. It really sucks when he wakes up a few time in a night whereas generally he doesn't wake up at all. Plus I don't mind him falling asleep later. He is just playing and talking in his room. Doesn't wake up DD.

[kozachka]

We are struggling with DS sleep issues, like Lisa's DS, ours would only get asleep next to one of us. His bed is in the same room as ours and we can't lock the room so not like we have any choice. Sometimes I sit next to him but most days it gets too tiring. Oftentimes we get asleep as well.

DS went through a stage where he was fighting naps so much that it was easier to skip them, which we did for couple months. He than went back to napping while he visited MIL in FL. I think being by the ocean and running around outside made him tired. DS def. needs a nap still, I can tell when he skipped his nap in daycare. He becomes too tired in the evenings. DS used to get asleep by 9:30 PM but after return from FL (and jetleg) it somehow moved to 10:30-11:15 PM. We've been working on moving it up earlier again. So some days, still very rarely, he is asleep by 9:30. Others, like yesterday, it's 10:30 PM. The problem is we get home by 7PM and it's really tough to feed him, give him a bath, read books, brush his teeth and play all in a matter of 2-2.5 hours. Luckily, on the days DS goes to bed later, he sleeps more in the morning except for the week-ends. This past week-end he was up at 7:15! A-g-r-h... I should not be really complaining because for the first 2.5 years of his life he was an early riser, up between 5:15 to 5:45. It was a real treat if I sleeped in till 6:15, I would wake up by myself.

[supercalifragilous]

DD is almost 4 and still naps about 1-2 hours a day. She's OK if she misses one (will go to sleep earlier at night) but she gets a little cranky.

She started fighting naps right after she turned 3, much like your DS, and she would be super cranky at 5 and there was NO WAY I was going to have her nap that late and push back bedtime.

I put her in her darkened room and told her she needed to stay in there for an hour until mommy came back. She talked to herself too but that was about all she could do b/c I have no toys or books in her room. She'd eventually get bored and fall asleep. I *knew* she was tired, she was just fighting it for the sake of it.

It took a couple weeks but after we got over that "hump", she was good to go. She still sleeps about 11-12 hours a night, depending on what time we go to bed. But no matter when we put her down, she will usually get up by 8-8:30, probably out of habit since that's when we get her up for school. If she's *really* tired, she'll sleep in till about 9-ish.

People may not agree, but I think kids are a creature of habit. We stick to a pretty stable schedule (save for some "special" days), so even though she fought it for a while, we just worked through it and she's back to her routine. It's just what works for us.

Loosely, this is usually her schedule:
8-9: Get ready for school
9-12: Preschool
12-1: Lunch
1-3: Play
3-5: Nap routine + naptime
5-8: Dinner, play
8-9: Bedtime routine + sleep

Of course, if she's tired, she'll go down for nap or bed earlier, depending on how hard she plays and the schedule will move up. I'm pretty intuitive and open about her schedule in that regard. Honestly I'd rather have her sleep a longer stretch at night than to take a longer nap.

About your son getting up too early in the morning - the Al Roker on the Today show was having that issue with his kid and the child expert had a really great idea - she suggested plugging in a night light to a timer and telling your child that he has to stay in bed until the light goes on, signaling it is time to get up for the day. I think it takes a pretty compliant kid and it won't work for everyone, but it's something to try, I guess. You'll only be out the cost of the timer, really.

[hardysmom]

varies so much kid to kid, household to household.

my 5 yr old will still take an occasional nap, and has quiet time for 1.5 hours every day.

My 3 yr old twins were having a hard time falling asleep and would run, play, and generally destroy their room. They were HOIRRIBLE if they didn't nap. I found that if I sit on the edge of their bed for about 15 minutes, they will sleep for about 2 hours. It is the calming down part that seems to be the challenge, they still need the sleep.

That said, my kids are all big sleepers relative to my friends kids. They nap from 1 - 3:30 (or 4) and then go to bed at 7:30... everyone wakes up between 6:30 and 7.

Stephanie

[brittone2]

DS was napping up til DD arrived, about 2 months before his 3rd bday. He'd still nap now if I'd put him down, but when Ella arrived, we skipped naps (he was skipping them occasionally prior to that) and he transitioned out of them.

He was napping great, but wasn't tired until 10 or later at night and it took forever to get him down. WIthout the nap he's in bed and asleep by or before 8pm, which was a miracle for him.

HE's a little tired around 2pm now and i'm sure he'd benefit from the nap, but our nighttime routine is much easier and he's able to get out of bed by 8am now, whereas before he wanted to sleep in until 9am or later, which made getting places early in the morning quite a chore.

[HallsofVA]

My DS just turned 3 in January and he's still taking a daily nap (thankfully!!), sometimes going over 2 hours if we let him. There are some days when he apparently doesn't get a full nap at school, and we can really tell because he'll get really grumpy and indecisive around dinner time. We try to stay consistent with the routine, putting him down for his nap right after lunchtime, but some days he'll read or talk to himself before settling down to sleep.

Reading everyone else's posts, sounds like it might be normal for them to get out of the naps sometime in the 3rd year. We plan to keep with the current routine as long as possible, settling for quiet time in his room even if he doesn't feel the need to sleep. Honestly, at this stage, with a newborn in the house, I need the quiet time as much as he does!

Most times, at night and at nap time, we let DS fall asleep listening to a CD of his choice (Raffi, Wiggles, Laurie B, etc.) set on sleep mode. That seems to help make his transition into sleep easier. Don't know if that would work for you or not.

Hope you get some sleep!

[happy2bamom]

thanks for all of the responses, that helps to put things in perspective. I really like the idea of the timed night light, and maybe we'll try some wind-down music too. Thanks for everyone's input. DS is actually napping right now (for the first time this week).

Kelli

[Elilly]

OMG! I need to stop whining about Colleen missing nap a couple times a week. At almost 4 1/2, I guess I need to count my blessings!

[crl]

DS started napping only about half the time around the time he turned three. He started getting harder and harder to get to sleep at night. He stopped napping almost completely around 3 years and 3 months. I moved bedtime up to 6:30 pm and he slept about 12 hours a night! We still do quiet time--45 minutes in his room, he's not allowed to talk to me, but he doesn't actually have to be quiet. About once a month he'll fall asleep then or if we are in the car at nap time. He's really hard to get to sleep those nights. He's also going to bed a little later in the last couple of weeks--more like 7:30pm.

Catherine