Last week, we talked all about short naps, but focused specifically on when babies take short naps and how to lengthen them. And while there is certainly some overlap, this week I want to focus specifically on toddlers and how to solve toddlers’ short naps.

Toddlers are amazing and wild and so challenging and so beautiful. My toddler will be three in a few days, so if you have a toddler right now, I’m right there with you. I love hanging out with her, AND I love nap time! We all need the reset.  

So this week we’re covering toddlers’ short naps, including:

• What is considered a “short nap”
• How long your toddler’s nap should be
• Why darkening your toddler’s bedroom will help lengthen their short naps
• How adjusting your toddler’s nap schedule could help them take longer naps
• The importance of getting your toddler’s energy out each morning to help them take long naps
• Why waiting to get your toddler up from their short nap could help them nap longer
• Considering jammies and/or a bath before your toddler’s nap
• When saving your toddler’s nap might help them take a longer nap, and when it won’t
• How sleep training helps extend your toddler’s short naps

What is considered a “short nap” for a toddler?

When I say toddler, I’m talking about little ones who are 18 months and older, and almost always on a one nap schedule. For toddlers on a one nap schedule, my general rule of thumb is that we want the nap to be at least 1.5 hours long.

So when I talk about short toddler naps, I’m talking about naps that are less than an hour and a half.  

But before we go any further, there’s a wide range of “toddler” ages, and as toddlers get older, they don’t have the same nap needs! So if you have an 18-month old, or a 2-year old, I aim for a 1.5 hour nap or more (2-2.5 hours is “the norm”).

However, as we start climbing to 2.5 years old, needs start varying quite a bit. Some toddlers are still taking a 1.5-2 hour nap every day, while others truly only need 45-60 minutes. Or they might be slowly inching toward dropping that afternoon nap.

All that to say, if you have a young toddler take short naps, keep reading! But if you have a 3-4 year old taking short naps, it might not actually be a short nap issue – it’s likely because they just don’t need as much sleep anymore, so take a deep breath and don’t worry about lengthening them!

Also, I said this last week but I want to say it again for the toddler parents…

if you have a toddler taking short naps and now you’re panicking because they’re not sleeping for at least 1.5 hours every day, therefore they’re not getting “good sleep” – THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M SAYING! There’s really no such things as a bad nap, or junk sleep.

Do we want them taking more than a 45-minute nap? Yes, because making it to bedtime, or close to bedtime, can get brutal with those short naps! And toddlers are already quite the adventure, regardless of their nap situation.

But even a 45-minute nap is sleep! They will still get a reset compared to having no nap at all.

So now that we know what I’m talking about when I say a short toddler nap, let’s talk about strategies to lengthen them…

1. Total Darkness

If your toddler regularly takes short naps, the first thing I always recommend is to check is their bedroom. We ideally want it to be so dark in there that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. I know that sounds crazy, but if there is any light streaming through their window during nap time, it could make it harder to not only fall asleep but to also stay asleep, hence the short nap!

This is true for babies and toddlers, but think about your chatty, FOMO toddler. They wake up after one sleep cycle, which means they’ve already gotten some rest. They see the light streaming through the window and they want to go play outside, or get back to their Lego! Why would they go back to sleep when they know fun could be had?

Are their toddlers whose rooms aren’t super dark and they take amazing naps? Absolutely! But if your toddler is a chronic short napper and there’s light in the room, blacking it out is the easiest first step – it could literally solve those short naps.

2. Adjust Their Schedule

When we talk about babies and their sleep schedule, we often talk about awake windows. When it comes to toddlers, however, wake windows are a thing of the past. We absolutely talk about schedules, and sleep pressure, and overtiredness and undertiredness, but it’s not under the umbrella of “awake windows” anymore.

We do still want to find the sweet spot of tired enough but not too tired, both for naps and bedtime. As both undertiredness and overtiredness can make your toddler’s sleep really challenging!

So if your toddler has been taking great naps and now their naps are all of a sudden getting shorter, it might be because they no longer have enough sleep pressure to take a longer nap.

If they’ve been napping at noon every day, it might be time to push their nap to 12:15, maybe even 12:30, to see if that added sleep pressure helps them sleep longer.

I try not to push toddlers’ naps much later than 1 pm, as that’s going to push their whole schedule later and later, and I don’t love bedtime being past 8/8:30. But it’s very normal to have to push your toddler’s nap back as they keep getting older, before dropping it altogether!

Oppositely, if you have a young toddler, maybe in the 18 month-2 year range, and they wake up at 6:30 or 7 am and their nap isn’t until 1 pm, there’s a chance their nap is actually a bit too late, and that overtiredness could actually be causing the short naps.

So sometimes we need to pull their nap back to 12 or 12:30 to prevent that cortisol spike.

3. Get Their Energy Out

The next tip to lengthen your toddler’s short naps is to make sure you’re getting your toddler’s energy out in the morning! Ideally they’re getting outside and running and climbing, but even on tough weather days, make sure they’re climbing, rolling, wrestling, dancing, jumping, etc. – toddler energy is next level, so sometimes short naps are purely due to not getting that energy out enough!

4. Wait!

If your toddler wakes up from a short nap, first just wait – wait at least 10 minutes before going in to get them up, and even consider waiting closer to 20 minutes. We want to give our toddlers the chance to fall back asleep into another cycle before calling the nap done. And if they take a short nap and wake up content, I recommend waiting even longer to get them!

You can wait the entirety of the ideal nap length. So if the goal is at least 1.5 hours and they only slept 45 minutes but woke up content, wait 45 minutes to get them up to finish that 1.5 hours in their crib. They may or may not fall back asleep, but we’re trying to tell their little body clock that this is nap time, and maybe tomorrow you should sleep longer.

Plus being in the dark room and with the sound machine on, they’re still getting some sort of rest compared to being in the living room playing and interacting.

5. Consider Jammies and/or a Bath

This next tip to lengthen your toddler’s short naps is kind of a two-in-one, and it might sound bizarre…

If your toddler regularly takes short naps but they sleep well overnight, and you’ve tried several tricks to lengthen their naps but it’s not working, consider putting them in jammies and/or giving them a bath before nap time! Basically boost their nap routine a bit more and make it feel more like bedtime – almost like we’re trying to trick their little body into a longer sleep.

This is not normally necessary, and I don’t regularly tell toddler parents to put their child in jammies for nap time, but I have seen it work! So why not try, if your stuck with short naps??

6. When to Save Your Toddler’s Nap, and When Not To

Next I’m going to talk about saving naps, and this tip comes with a caveat. While saving your toddler’s nap might lengthen it, this isn’t a great long-term solution if you want your toddler to take long naps on their own.

So first, what am I talking about? Saving a nap means your toddler takes a short nap and you then try to get them back to sleep; maybe that’s quickly shushing them back to sleep in their crib, but I’d say more often than not it looks like cuddling them or pulling them into your bed to finish their nap.

I very rarely recommend saving a toddler’s nap. Have I done it before? Sure. Maybe because my toddler is sick, or if they’re having a tough day or something and I just think they need it; there are always great reasons to break sleep rules.

But in general, don’t do it! It doesn’t take much for toddlers, especially, to catch on to new patterns or to get an idea in their mind (like napping on mom or dad) and become really set on it being the only way things should happen moving forward.

So maybe they’re short nappers because they know they can finish the nap on you. Or maybe saving the nap a few times has planted the seed that they can sleep on you or with you, and now they expect that before you even lay them down.

So if the goal is longer naps, saving them each time is just going to perpetuate the short naps – how are they supposed to learn to lengthen them if you teach them they need you to lengthen them each day? Not to mention trying to save a toddler’s nap often backfires, because they see you and just want to play and chat!

7. Sleep Train

The last tip I’m going to share to help lengthen your toddler’s short naps is to sleep train.

Most people think about sleep training and they think about babies, but we can absolutely sleep train toddlers, too, and here at Via Graces, we help toddler families all the time!

So if you’ve already sleep trained and your toddler is still taking short naps, we need to do some more digging – do they still use a pacifier? Do they have a cup of milk before their nap?

But if you haven’t sleep trained and you’ve tried every other tip and your toddler is still taking short naps, sleep training will likely do the trick! Just like I said with the babies, I’m not saying you have to sleep train, but let me explain why it would help…

If you still rock your toddler to sleep or hold their hand, or lay with them as they fall asleep, they are relying on you to fall asleep – they don’t know how to fall asleep independently, which means they also don’t know how to connect sleep cycles independently. So they generally stir from one cycle and rather than going right back to sleep, they wake up.

And even though they might still be tired, they just don’t know how to fall asleep again without your help.

The whole idea of sleep training, however, is we teach toddlers to fall asleep independently – that means we run through our nap or bedtime routine, lay them down, walk away, and know they’ll be asleep within a few minutes.

That way when they naturally stir in the night, or stir out of one nap cycle, they can go right back to sleep and you likely won’t even know it happened.

I know it sounds “simple,” but when we work with families whose toddlers struggle with short naps, sleep training usually does the trick! We of course tackle the sleep environment and find the right schedule for the toddler, but gaining these new independent sleep skills really makes a difference.

If you’re curious to learn more about what your sleep training options are for your toddler, read here.

Conclusion

When trying to solve your toddler’s short naps, I want to remind you to let TIME do it’s job. Sure, sometimes we have overnight fixes, but more often than not it’s going to take several days before we start seeing improvements with your toddler’s sleep, especially with their naps. So hang tight!

The goal here is to help give you tangible strategies to help lengthen your toddler’s short naps starting now! Your toddler is capable of taking a great nap every day, and we want to help you get there.

Also remember that naps are hard. Toddlers can be hard.  And short naps are frustrating! But also, a short nap is still a nap – your toddler is still getting rest and it is 1000 times better than no nap at all.

So yes, let’s work on solving those pesky short naps, but let’s also give ourselves some grace!

Now, if you’ve run through the above strategies to lengthen your toddler’s short naps and you’re still stumped, that’s what we’re here for! We work with families like yours all the time, figuring out how to help your toddler get the best sleep possible. So to learn more about how we can help get your toddler sleeping, click here.

With Grace,

Lauren