Updated for 2025

Understanding nap sleep structure and why some nap routines work better than others is tricky, but if you hang in there and read this blog you should have a better understanding in about 10 minutes!

Babies thrive on consistency; they love their nap routines and many parents spend hours looking online and in books to find the perfect nap routine for their baby.

One of the most common questions we get asked is why do you cap the morning nap? Why shouldn’t I do a long morning sleep and a shorter later afternoon sleep?

There are a lot of reasons, and my experience with over 100,000 babies tells me that a lot of the time the shorter morning sleep suits babies nd works well, especially when established early on. Below are a few of these benefits.

• A short morning sleep encourages a longer lunch time sleep, this can create a very balanced day, where a long awake period can happen after the big lunch nap, enabling a longer night sleep from the longer awake time.
• A long morning sleep can be seen as an extension of a baby’s night sleep, and contribute to early morning wake ups in children over 6 months old.
• A short morning sleep is easy to achieve out and about and on the go, so you can get moving in the morning and head off to kinder or playgroup or to run errands and know that your baby only needs a quick nap in the car to be fine until after lunch.

• A long morning sleep usually means a short afternoon sleep, which means your baby is surviving from potentially 11am to bedtime on only maybe 45 minutes’ sleep between 1-4pm. This can mean your baby is very over-tired come bedtime and thus doesn’t sleep well at night. To avoid this, if you do a longer than 30 minute morning nap after 6 months, then extend the awake time between nap 1 and 2, push it to 3-3.5 hours, this means the second nap will start later and end later. Even if it's not very long, it will mean the baby can get to bed without being super overtired.
• When you drop to one nap at 15-18 months, simply dropping a morning nap and keeping a lunch nap is easy if you have a short and long lunch nap. But if you are on a medium - medium nap routine you'll find the morning nap pushes your afternoon nap as late as 2.30/3pm, this is too late for a nap at this age, and is a sign to either reduce the morning nap, or you can slowly move the morning nap later and later while trimming the afternoon nap until its 15 minutes or less, then drop it with an established lunchtime nap.

Lets have a look at a visual of sleep structure, and naps designed to encourage good night sleep!

Below we have 3 naps a day, a morning nap a lunch nap and a short teeny afternoon nap. 

As we mentioned above, the short morning sleep encourages the morning wake up to move to 6/7am, rathe than 4/5am.

This can often also be achieved by a 3-hour morning awake time once the baby is old enough.

As always, do what works for you and your family.