Nursery naps

My son has been rocked to sleep (or some sort of movement) pretty much since birth and it works for us. He sleeps 12 hours overnight and has 2 naps. Rocking him to sleep literally takes under 3 minutes. He started going to nursery 2 days a week and his nursery room leader has said they don’t rock kids to sleep, instead lay them down in a dark room etc (which is fine, I understand it’ll be unreasonable to rock all the babies to sleep). Every time I go to pick him up, she complains to me that it takes them awhile to get him to sleep and wants me to sleep train him so he can sleep his naps by himself. We’ve tried but every nap/bedtime now takes us ~30 minutes and a lot of that involves crying. I hate it! Also, she is also not pleased that he only naps 40 minutes (1st nap) 1 hour (2nd nap). She says all the other babies are napping almost 2-3 hours for the PM nap. I don’t want him napping so much at nursery as he’ll get too much daytime nap.

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Mate, nurseries drive me nuts! It's your baby so you get to say how you would like them to be looked after. You dont have to sleep train for them, only do it if you want to/think it will benefit your kid. Also they can nap whenever works for you. Nursery will have to deal with it. Gosh it makes me so annoyed! You can't change what works for you and your baby just to suit them! X

My nursery said they'd help her to sleep however they need to. I don't understand why some are like this. If all the other kids sleep independently it surely is not much work to rock one baby to sleep for 3 minutes. Don't sleep train if you don't want to! They'll have to figure it out.

Our nursery would support the babies in whatever way they needed to to help them to sleep. Our nursery also tried to stick to our routine, but actually LO was showing signs of dropping to one nap anyway when he started nursery, after a few days he was on a one nap schedule at nursery and home and it worked for us. Our nursery tends to follow the parents lead - certain parents cap babies daytime sleep, and so the nursery staff will wake the LOs up as soon as they hit their limit. It sounds like your nursery isn’t being flexible enough to be honest. Hopefully you can find some sort of resolution that works for both of you

I think it’s unreasonable for the nursery to ask you to sleep train if it goes against what you feel is best. I also think a 2-3 hour nap in the afternoon is just them being lazy! I’m lucky if my son sleep a 3 hour stretch at night, if he did that in the afternoon I think he’d pull an all-nighter 😂

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. A nursery can’t tell you how to parent your child or what their sleep needs are! I would be finding somewhere else or tell them they can choose to get quicker sleep from him if they rock him to sleep. That’s up to them. Everything else is up to you.

I think their approach is shocking to say the least. My little one only has 1 nap a day, it is usually around 2 hours in the morning, but he can sometimes wake after 30mins and still won't nap until it's bedtime around 7pm. He is only in nursery a couple of afternoons a week at the moment. He takes alot of rocking, feeding and shushing to get to sleep - it's hard work but nothing else works. You've gotta do what works for you, the Nursery should either help you or be consistent with your methods, the certainly shouldn't be making you feel like you're doing wrong, or comparing him to any other child xxx

Thank you everyone for understanding! Every time I send him to nursery, I always have to brace for the impending complains when I pick him up. Another huge part of why I think it takes him so long to sleep is their nap schedule timings, and he’s just not tired enough. AM nap is 9am and PM nap is 12:30pm. I’ve told them his wake windows are around 3.5 hours but she just says “he’ll get used to our schedule eventually. All the kids do”

So frustrating! Hang in there and stand your ground 💕 xxx

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