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Home › Articles › Development › If You Snooze, You Lose?

If You Snooze, You Lose?

Knowing When It's Time
to Give up Naptime

By Lisa A. Goldstein

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Does your toddler or preschooler appear to be giving up on naptime? Is it World War III when she doesn't nap? Deciding when children are ready to go without a midday snooze perplexes many parents. But do parents really have much say, or does a child's developmental alarm clock rule when it comes to naptime?

Giving up Naps
"Most children go from two naps to one between 12 and 18 months," says Dr. Judy Owens, director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I. "The age of giving up naps altogether varies. At 2 years, 80 percent of children are still napping. At 3 years, this drops to about 60 percent, but a quarter of 4-year-olds and even about 10 to 15 percent of 5-year-olds still take a daily nap. But each child is different; it is more important to read your child's signals than get hung up on the 'right' age or the 'best' way."

It's somewhere around 4 to 6 years of age that kids start to consistently give up their nap, says Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, author of Sleepless in America: Is Your Child Misbehaving or Missing Sleep? (HarperCollins, 2006). "The key is good energy and behavior throughout the day," she says. "That means that you do not get the 'poison hour' late in the afternoon where he's constantly picking fights and melting down or falling asleep whenever you get into the car to run errands."

A compilation of signs that a child is ready to give up a nap include the following: