How long did you let your DC nap in swing / bouncer/ etc?

[CharlotteMommy]

4 mo DD is sleeping through the night (11-12 hours a night since last week), but her daytime sleep is extremely poor and unpredictable. She is just so stubborn, and fights sleep like nothing I have seen before. The best chance I have to get at least one solid nap out of her is in her swing, but I don't know how much longer to let that keep happening before she becomes dependent on it and I'll be stuck breaking the habit somewhere down the road. I tried to force naps in the crib for the past two days with disasterous results (yesterday she literally did not nap at all - we're talking ZERO minutes of nap time all day).

How long is too long to continue to let her take her naps on the swing? Anyone else have a horrible napper? Tell me it gets better! :) TIA!

[erosenst]

DD was very much like yours - great sleeper at night, terrible napper. You're not going to like this - but she didn't nap well/consistently til about 10 months.

If you read Healthy Sleep Habits/Happy Child (I'm a *huge* fan) Weissbluth believes that naps often take much longer to 'organize' than night sleep...and are totally not connected to night sleep. I'm assuming that DD's night sleep occurs somewhere you're ok with - crib, co-sleeping, whatever. If that's the case, I would continue to let her nap in the swing.

The biggest issue/risk with that is that you're tied to the swing for naps - but since I insisted that DD be home for naps 90%+ of the time once they *did* normalize, that wouldn't really concern me. I'd rather she get the naps in now than not.

And fwiw - DD is now almost 8. She never napped as well/long as a lot of kids. She's small for her age - daycare started putting her back in the swing at about 10 months til 14 months because it helped her nap. Starting at about 2 years she napped a good 90-120 minutes - but until then took more frequent but shorter naps. (Want to say that, when she was home, she had two naps until very shortly before her 2nd bday - and still had a third short one occasionally.)

Hang in there - and remember that the 11-12 hours at night is something many people would kill for :).