The Danger Nap · Blissed Out Babies (2024)

A danger nap is a nap taken ‘late’ in the afternoon which affects the child’s usual bedtime, typically making it later than normal.

This means that some parents will try to prevent little ones from falling asleep and keep them awake until bedtime.

Firstly let me clarify that in older children, I have no problem with parents worrying about keeping a consistent and reasonably timed bedtime when a ‘late’ nap means that bedtime will end up being 10 or 11pm. After all this often means they will be tired the next day and this isn’t ideal when there’s school or other important plans ahead… and of course, they don’t get to nap to catch up the next day.

Where I do want to ask parents to reconsider the concept of the danger nap is when you have a younger baby (between 3 and 18 months), when wake windows are typically 2-4 hours long.

Let’s dig into it in more detail to explain why.

Naps happen when daytime sleep pressure builds to a point where the body gets sleepy. Think of it like hunger, the longer we go without eating, the hungrier we get, until it’s almost unbearable and we just HAVE to eat. Its the same with sleep, we’re awake longer and longer until our body says OK that’s it, I MUST SLEEP!

Children need a lot more sleep than adults, and the way they bank those extra hours is through napping.

Naps are also helpful for improving mood and helping the brain to consolidate memory.

The length of time children can tolerate being awake between naps is known as the ‘wake window’. For children who are not naturally very routine driven, these wake windows can change from day to day, so I don’t typically recommend following them rigidly, but they can be a useful guide. Wake windows tend to get longer as children get older so the gaps between naps will get longer and the frequency of the naps will reduce too.

Usually, day sleep needs decrease with age and children end up consolidating all the sleep they need into the night by 5 years old. If you’d like to read my thoughts on creating the perfect baby nap routine, check out this blog.

In an ideal world we would just go with the flow and let children sleep when they want and for as long as they need. The human body is more than capable of controlling this, it’s not biologically something parents NEED to control.

The modern problem comes when we have commitments such as work and school which define the time that we need to get up and out of the house. Furthermore, we are very used to being in control of our lives, and babies just don’t always fit in with our own needs for routine and predictability.

So it’s not always possible for us to just go with the flow.

If our children go to bed at 10pm and need to wake at 6 to get to school on time, they’re not going to be in their best mood, nor will their brains and bodies be ready for learning.

Also, parenting is stressful nowadays, finances are tough, both parents might be working, and there’s a lot less support from friends/family available so it’s no wonder that parents look forward to their child-free evenings to recoup. Which can mean the thought of a later bedtime fills us with dread….

So for older children who need to go to school or nursery the following day, those later bedtimes will have an impact. In this case it’s totally OK to consider whether your child having a nap is sensible, or whether you can distract them enough to get through to bedtime.

But for younger babies, could worrying about the Danger Nap and keeping them awake until bedtime actually be doing more harm than good?

Let’s consider the impact of overtiredness.

There’s a lot of chat in the sleep world about overtiredness, and it’s true, that overtiredness or the dysregulation that comes with it can impact sleep.

The human body is clever, if it misses that opportunity to go to sleep when it needs to, it has a protective process to prevent us coming to harm.

Think about what we do as adults when we’re hitting that 3pm energy dip and we’re in the office where it would be frowned upon to take a nap… what do we do? We often go and make a coffee to perk us up for a while. The impact of the caffeine helps us to get through that tired period temporarily, we have a little more energy, clarity of mind and feel better for a short while, before crashing again a bit later on.

The body does the same thing.. if we don’t sleep when we need to, the body releases cortisol and adrenaline to give us an energy burst and help us to keep going a bit longer. This is what happens when your little one misses that nap.

Cortisol is actually a very useful hormone, it is what keeps us awake and alert during the day. It starts to rise from around 4 am. If your child goes to sleep with excess cortisol in the system, this compounds at 4am and can cause them to wake up early.

The other thing that happens when a child goes to sleep overtired at bedtime, is that the nighttime sleep cycles are impacted.

Because they are so tired, they crash into the sleep cycle and miss out on the very important first part, where our brain is slowly winding down, the brain then tries to catch this up over the next two or three sleep cycles which can mean they will wake frequently after going to bed.

So you can see how allowing children to get overtired is actually counterproductive for sleep, is it really worth stopping your child from having ‘the danger nap’ and keeping little ones awake when this is what might happen?

Personally I think the idea of the danger nap should be avoided when your child still has relatively short wake windows. So definitely before 12 months and maybe even later up to 18 months depending on your child’s tolerance for being awake/tired.

With what we know about overtiredness, it’s often not worth the risk if taking that nap just means a bedtime that’s a couple of hours later than normal. Heck, a later bedtime for younger children is almost always preferable, after all, they may only do 10 or 11 hours overnight anyway so we don’t want to be putting them down too early.

If you’re really worried about bedtime disruption, and they’re just desperate to go to sleep, it can be helpful to cap the length of the ‘danger nap’ so that sleep pressure for bedtime isn’t too severely affected. A power nap of 10/15 minutes can sometimes rescue a bad nap day and is preferable to keeping them awake for longer than necessary.

I would also reassure parents that your child having one-off late naps and later bedtimes most likely won’t cause significant sleep issues in the long term. So if you’re travelling back from a fun day out and are panicking about them sleeping and it interfering with bedtime, try to chill about it and view it as more family time to enjoy together. Just do bedtime later by following their cues.

If you’d like to get some support with routines, naps and bedtime issues, feel free to drop me a line and let’s chat through the options, or take a look at my book The Better Sleep Blueprint for a realistic guide to baby sleep up to 2 years with strategies to get better sleep without sleep training.

Want a FREE average sleep needs chart to see how your little one’s sleep measures up? Pop your email in and I’ll send that over to you.