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My friends’ kids, all born a few months before my 13-month-old, are starting to drop naps. My girl still does two naps a day. How do I know not only when to transition to fewer naps, but also how do I prepare for that day when it comes? My schedule relies heavily on her frequent naps.
—Lynn
Let’s begin with some data. In 2024, we surveyed ParentData users about their child’s sleep, including both nap and nighttime sleep. We had a sample size of almost 15,000 users, and we got information on the timing of naps and the number as children aged.
The graph below shows the number of naps by age group.
You are right in the middle of the nap transition period. For babies 10 to 12 months, nearly all of them take two naps, but in the 13 to 18-month group, only about 40% take two naps. By the 19 to 24-month group, nearly everyone is taking only one nap. You should expect, then, that sometime in the next six months, your daughter will move down to one nap.
How will you know when to transition? Usually, the clue is a child who stops seeming very sleepy at the first nap or takes a very long time to fall asleep. If your child normally naps for an hour in the morning and all of a sudden they start taking 53 minutes to fall asleep at that nap, that’s a sign of a need to transition. For babies in day care, this transition is often forced by moving from one classroom to a classroom with a single nap.
You can expect that when this transition happens, the timing changes somewhat. With two-nap children, our data showed most first naps started at 9:30 and second naps around 2 p.m. When children move to one nap, it tends to start after lunch, around 12:30 or 1.
In terms of preparation, I would be lying if I said this wasn’t going to require some adjustment. The good news is that when children move to one nap, they tend to nap much longer — two hours on average — so you may not actually lose as much time as you think. But you will not be getting your morning hour, so it’s worth thinking now about how you might be able to work around this new schedule, whenever it arrives.
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