Toddler Wake Windows

A toddler is awake for a long time: three and a half to four and a half hours between sleeps from thirteen to seventeen months, four to five and a half from eighteen months to two, and five to seven hours by two and three years old. That is one nap for most of it — two for a while at the start, none at all by the end — with a total of 11 to 14 hours of sleep per 24 hours at one and two, and 10 to 13 hours from three to five. The windows are now long enough that where you put the nap decides the whole day.

The subject also changes at this age. Up to a year, sleep trouble was mostly a body doing something new. From here it is a person with opinions, a vocabulary and a strong view about going to bed, and the useful answers are less about timing than about what happens in the twenty minutes before the light goes off.

Two long stretches, and one nap between them

Once the second nap has gone, the day has a very simple shape: wake, a long stretch, one nap, a longer stretch, bed. Nothing else is in it. That simplicity is why the placement of the single nap matters so much — it is the only lever left.

Put it too early and the afternoon becomes enormous. A child who naps at half past eleven and wakes at one has five or six hours to get through before bedtime, which at fifteen months is more than she can manage without falling apart at five o'clock. Put it too late and it eats bedtime instead: a nap ending at half past three pushes settling towards eight and makes the whole evening a negotiation.

Most families land on a nap starting somewhere around midday, give or take an hour, with the morning stretch a little shorter than the afternoon one. That is arithmetic rather than advice: take her wake-up time, add the short end of the band, and see where it lands. The wake window calculator will do it against the clock, and the sleep schedule generator draws the whole day, including how much vaguer the estimate gets as the afternoon goes on. The bands themselves are compiled from published total-sleep figures rather than copied from anybody's table — the wake windows by age overview shows the working, and the nine to twelve month guide covers the two-nap quarter that comes before this one.

Between thirteen and seventeen months the day is genuinely unsettled: one nap on some days, two on others, and both are ordinary. The compiled ages for the drop are around thirteen to eighteen months and they overlap on purpose, because no health body publishes a nap-transition schedule for anybody to quote. The two-to-one nap transition guide covers the wobble properly, and the nap transition checker will tell you to wait if waiting is the answer.

Bedtime resistance is a toddler's job

Somewhere in the second year the bedtime that used to take ten minutes starts taking forty. She needs a drink. She needs the other book. She needs to tell you about a dog. This is not a sleep problem and it does not mean the timing is wrong; it means she has worked out that bedtime is a thing that happens to her, and she has opinions about things that happen to her.

The answers are boring, which is the point:

• The same short order of events, every night. Four or five steps, in the same sequence, taking the same twenty minutes. Predictability does more work here than anything you say.
• One drink. One story. Decide the number before you start, and let the number be the answer rather than your patience.
• Hold the boundary kindly. The same few words, said warmly, as many times as it takes. Going back in is not failure; going back in and starting the evening again is what gets expensive.
• Move the whole thing earlier, not later, if she is fighting it and waking cross. A child arriving at bedtime overtired resists harder than one arriving sleepy.

None of that comes from a source at the foot of this page. It is what parents commonly report and what this app commonly sees, and it is worth labelling as such, because plenty of pages sell the same advice with an authority nobody granted it.

Words, and what they do to a night

The American Academy of Pediatrics offers its milestones as a guide rather than a test — children develop at different rates — and for this stretch it has toddlers learning about one new word each week between eighteen months and two years, with most saying somewhere around fifty to a hundred words by their second birthday.

A child who has just found words uses them, and bedtime is a stage. Some of the extra forty minutes is genuinely new language being practised out loud in a dark room, which is a good thing happening at an inconvenient hour. It also gives her a way to ask for things she previously could only cry about, so the requests get specific and the negotiation gets better. Nobody has measured a language burst against night waking, so treat the connection as a plausible explanation rather than a finding.

Separation anxiety is the other half of it, and there is better news here: the AAP describes it as beginning in the second half of the first year and usually fading somewhere around the second birthday. Much of what makes eighteen months hard is on its way out by two. The guides to what happens around eighteen months and two years go through it properly, including the honest bit: no publisher this site may cite uses the word regression, prints the list of ages or puts a length on any of it.

The cot, and when the bed comes

The honest position on moving to a bed is later rather than earlier. A cot is a boundary that works while she is in it, and a bed is a door she can open at two in the morning — most families who move early spend the next month walking a child back. The reason to move is that she is climbing out, because a climbed cot is more dangerous than a bed. Not her age, not a new sibling arriving, not that the cot looks small.

While she is still in the cot, the published guidance is written about babies and it does not soften with age: on their back for every sleep, on a firm flat surface, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys. Nothing weighted goes on or over a sleeping child, at any age. With a toddler, drop the mattress to its lowest setting and take out anything she can stand on — a bumper, a cushion, a pile of soft toys is a step ladder to somebody who has just learned to climb.

When the bed does come, the room becomes the cot. That is the whole idea: nothing she can climb, nothing that can come down on her, furniture anchored to the wall, blind cords out of reach, a stairgate on the door or the landing. You are no longer keeping a boundary around her bed; you are making the room a place she can be awake in safely.

When the last nap goes

Not yet, probably. The last nap goes anywhere from about two and a half to past four, and the spread between one child and another at three years old is enormous — some nap for two hours, some have not napped for a year, and both are ordinary. When toddlers stop napping answers that one properly rather than in a paragraph here, including the version most families actually live: a long stretch where she does not sleep but still needs an hour of quiet in the afternoon.

As always, if what worries you is not the timing — a child who cannot be settled at all, breathing that sounds wrong in the night, a change in her that came from nowhere — that is a conversation with your pediatrician or health visitor. No page can see your child.