Wake Windows for a 9 to 12 Month Old

From nine to ten months most babies manage two and a half to three and a half hours awake between sleeps, and from eleven to twelve months three to four. Two naps, and a total of 12 to 16 hours of sleep per 24 hours with naps counted in — 11 to 14 hours once she turns one, depending on which published figure you take. Two naps is the settled shape of this entire quarter, and the most common mistake in it is dropping to one too early.

This is a calmer stretch than the one before it. The bands widen slowly, the day has an obvious skeleton, and most of what goes wrong goes wrong for one of three reasons: a nap dropped months ahead of schedule, a baby practising standing at midnight, or a five o'clock start that has quietly become the new morning. All three are below.

The shape of the day at nine, ten, eleven and twelve months

A morning nap somewhere around two and a half to three hours after she gets up, a longer nap in the early afternoon, then the longest awake stretch of the day before bed. That is it, and it barely changes for three or four months. What changes is the size of the gaps: two and a half to three and a half hours between sleeps at nine and ten, three to four by eleven and twelve.

Total sleep is where the published figures live, and two of them cover this age. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's consensus, which the American Academy of Pediatrics supports, gives 12 to 16 hours per 24 hours including naps up to twelve months, then 11 to 14 hours for one- and two-year-olds. The NHS puts babies aged six to twelve months at around 15 hours in total, and around 12 to 15 hours after the first birthday. Those overlap rather than agree exactly, which tells you something useful about how precise this subject is. The bands on this site are worked out from those totals rather than lifted from anybody's chart — the wake windows by age overview shows the arithmetic once, and the wake window calculator does it against the clock.

If you want to see the whole day laid end to end, including how the estimate gets vaguer with each nap you stack on the last one, the sleep schedule generator draws it. Compare it with the seven and eight month day and the difference is mostly that the afternoon has got long.

The nap drop that arrives too early

Somewhere around ten or eleven months a baby who has been napping twice a day for months starts refusing the morning one. She lies there talking. She kicks the bars. Three days of this and it is very hard not to conclude that she is ready for one nap.

She is usually not. Two naps to one works for most babies somewhere between thirteen and eighteen months, and a fortnight of morning-nap refusal at eleven or twelve is far more often a phase — a new skill, a tooth, a stretch of separation anxiety — than a signal. The cost of getting this wrong is specific and unpleasant: a baby on one nap before she can hold the day together gets overtired by mid-afternoon, goes to bed exhausted, and starts waking at five in the morning. That five o'clock start then takes weeks to unwind, long after the nap has been put back.

Three things hold a two-nap day together while it wobbles:

• Cap the morning nap. If she sleeps ninety minutes in the morning she does not need the afternoon one. Waking her at forty-five minutes to an hour protects the nap that matters.
• Protect the second nap as the fixed point of the day. It is the one carrying the long stretch before bedtime, and it is the last one that should ever be given up.
• Bring bedtime forward on the days the second nap fails. Half an hour earlier is the cheapest repair available, and it costs nothing the next morning.

Nobody publishes any of that, so take it as what parents commonly report and this app commonly sees rather than as guidance. The nap ages themselves are compiled and hedged for the same reason: no health body prints a nap-transition schedule either. The nap transition checker will happily tell you to wait, and the two-to-one nap transition guide covers the drop properly when it does come.

What she is learning, and what it costs at night

The American Academy of Pediatrics has crawling mastered somewhere between seven and ten months, with the honest footnote that some children never crawl at all and scoot or slither instead, and describes babies of this age pulling themselves up to standing every chance they get. Cruising along the furniture usually follows, and walking arrives across a spread so wide that no page should put a month on it.

Standing is the one that shows up in the night. A baby who has just found the skill will practise it at 1am, get to her feet in the dark and then be unable to work out how to sit back down. Daytime practice at lowering herself does more for that than any change to the timing of the day.

Language starts at the same time. The AAP's milestone guidance — offered as a guide rather than a test, because children develop at different rates — has most babies saying at least one word by their first birthday. First words tend to arrive alongside a burst of general noise, some of which happens in the cot at four in the morning.

If you have seen this fortnight called the twelve-month sleep regression, the guide to what happens around a year takes the label apart: no publisher this site may cite uses the word, prints the list of ages or attaches a length to it. The milestones are what is documented, and they are documented as ranges.

The five o'clock morning

Early waking is the complaint of this quarter, and it has more causes than it has fixes. Work through them in this order: too little day sleep, which is usually a nap dropped too soon; too much day sleep, particularly a late afternoon nap that has crept back in; a bedtime so late that she arrives overtired; light and noise arriving at five; and hunger, which is worth a thought in a baby who is eating less milk than she was.

Whatever you change, change it by fifteen minutes and give it a week. A five o'clock start moves slowly and it moves backwards for a few days first. And treat anything before six as morning if she is genuinely up: going in and out of a dark room for an hour teaches her that five o'clock is an interesting time to be awake.

The first birthday changes nothing

It changes what people ask you at parties. A baby is exactly the same on the day after her birthday as she was on the day before, the published total-sleep figure steps down by an hour at each end and nothing else moves. She does not need one nap because she is one. She does not need to sleep through because she is one — night waking is ordinary well past the first birthday, and nothing on this site attaches a month to it.

What is worth doing at a year is nothing, or very little. Keep the two naps. Keep bedtime where it is. Let the nap drop happen when it happens, which for most babies is a good few months away — the toddler guide picks it up from thirteen months.

Safe sleep at nine to twelve months

None of this changes where or how she sleeps. Babies go down on their back for every sleep, day and night, on a firm flat surface, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys, with a fitted sheet and nothing else. Nothing weighted goes on or over a sleeping baby. With a baby who can pull up, the cot mattress belongs at its lowest setting and anything she could climb on comes out — a cot with nothing in it is the safe one and the boring one at the same time.

And if the worry is not the timing — feeding, weight gain, a baby who cannot be settled at all, a cry that does not sound like her usual one — that is a conversation with your pediatrician or health visitor. No page can see your baby.