Listen on Apple | Spotify | YouTube

What do you do when your baby or toddler skips a nap?

Whether your child refuses a nap, takes a 15-minute car nap instead of their usual 90 minute nap, or simply has an unexpectedly short day of sleep, an off nap day can leave parents wondering what to do next.

In this short but practical episode, Allison breaks down exactly how to handle a skipped or shortened nap without throwing off the rest of your child’s sleep schedule.

You’ll learn:
— What to do when a nap is completely skipped or significantly shortened
— Why Allison generally recommends moving ahead to the next normal nap window rather than squeezing in a “makeup” nap
— What she means by a nap happening in “no man’s land” and why naps outside your child’s normal sleep windows can create additional sleep challenges
— How to use nap wake-up caps to protect bedtime and nighttime sleep
— When it makes sense to put your child down for the next nap slightly earlier
— How a rescue bedtime can help make up for missed daytime sleep
— Why an earlier bedtime doesn’t necessarily mean an earlier morning wake-up
— How to reset your child’s sleep schedule after an unpredictable nap day
— When frequent skipped naps may be a sign that your child’s schedule needs to change or that they’re ready for a nap transition

Chapter Markers:
00:00 – Helping Kids Take Ownership of Their Sleep
02:19 – What to Do When Your Baby or Toddler Skips a Nap
03:01 – Why Skipped Naps Don’t Need to Derail Your Day
04:05 – Should You Try for a Makeup Nap?
05:21 – Avoiding “No Man’s Land” Naps
06:30 – Why Nap Wake-Up Caps Still Matter
07:44 – How to Handle a Completely Skipped Nap
09:00 – The Rescue Bedtime: Your Best Tool for Missed Day Sleep
10:08 – How an Earlier Bedtime Makes Up for a Skipped Nap
11:30 – Will an Earlier Bedtime Cause an Earlier Wake-Up?
12:32 – One Bad Nap Day Won’t Ruin Your Child’s Sleep
13:20 – How to Reset Your Child’s Sleep Schedule the Next Day
14:15 – When Frequent Skipped Naps Signal a Schedule Change
14:55 – How Sleep and Wellness Coach Can Help

Resources mentioned:
— Episode 236. The Rescue Bedtime: What It Is and How to Use It for Overtired Babies and Toddlers
— Reach out to Allison and her team anytime for a free 15 minute consultation for help with your child’s skipped naps

Looking for expert guidance on your child’s sleep? Allison offers two free age-specific guides to help you discover how much sleep kids need to thrive—at any age. Get your free copy now: 0-2 Years Old or 3 to 10 years old

From baby sleep to toddler sleep, daycare naps to sleep training—How Long ’Til Bedtime? is the podcast for parents who want practical, guilt-free sleep tips they can actually use.

Hosted by pediatric sleep coach Allison Egidi, each episode delivers real solutions for every stage—from navigating newborn sleep struggles and weaning night feedings to helping your 3-year-old fall asleep independently (and stay asleep!). Whether you’re trying to make sense of daycare sleep patterns, craving your evenings back, or simply need a working mom podcast to keep you grounded, you’re in the right place.

Want more from Allison? Sign up here to get her weekly email with podcast updates and other helpful parenting topics.

Enjoying How Long ‘Til Bedtime?
Your rating and review help Allison reach and support more parents.
— On Apple Podcasts: Click here, scroll to the bottom, rate the show, and tap “Write a Review.”
— On Spotify: Click here to leave a rating or review.
Don’t miss an episode—subscribe so you’re always up to date!

Connect with Allison:
Instagram | Facebook | Website | YouTube

Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

258. What to Do When Your Baby or Toddler Skips a Nap

Allison Egidi: Before we dive in today, I want to share a recent win that brought me so much joy. One thing that I’ve been wanting to do more of the past couple of years is talk directly to middle and high school students about their sleep because I don’t think enough kids truly understand the power of sleep. So my goal is always to help them understand the science of sleep and how they could use sleep to level up.

Well, this past week I got the opportunity to speak to four hundred and twenty-five middle and high school students. And as I go into a talk like this, my goal is to just get them to consider that they could take a little more ownership of their sleep and that they could potentially try something different just to test out if they could be sleeping better.

So I presented to these students during the day, and then in the evening there was a session with the parents. And can I just tell you the joy that I felt when a mom raised her hand and said that her son had come home from school and moved his phone and computer chargers out of his room. And when she asked him what he was doing, he basically said his biggest takeaway from our conversation was that if he kept his devices out of his room when it was time to sleep, that he would sleep better.

You guys. This made me so happy just to know that I got at least one of these students to take action. Even when I came home and told my middle school girls this story, they were thrilled for me. They said, That’s amazing. You did it. You did what you wanted to do. You helped them understand how they could sleep better. So that’s my win for the week. And I hope it will be your reminder that as your babies become toddlers and then they go to elementary school and then middle school and high school, it’s important to continue to educate them at an age-appropriate level about the power of sleep and how they can use it to their advantage.

Okay, on to today’s episode, which is a short one, but an important one on a topic that I get asked about a lot, and that is what do we do when our baby or our toddler skips a nap?

Hey there, Allison here. Welcome back to How Long ‘Til Bedtime. If you have a baby or toddler who naps, you already know that nap days are not always going to be perfect. They are not robots, and sometimes we might have something to do that throws the schedule off. So we have to go into this conversation knowing that some days everything is not going to go according to plan, despite the fact that if you’re anything like me, you love some consistency.

So what do we do on the days where suddenly we just get a 15-minute car nap instead of the hour and a half crib nap? This is often where parents get stuck not knowing what to do next. Do you try for another nap? Do you just push through to bedtime? Do you let them sleep in the car even though it’s not in a normal window where they would nap? Today I want to give you clear, simple guidelines on what to do when a nap gets skipped. Because I want you to be able to confidently move forward and stop second-guessing yourself.

So let’s start with the most common scenario. Your baby is on a three-nap schedule. And the one in the middle of the day gets skipped or cut short for all the reasons this may happen. Maybe they just wouldn’t go down because the timing was a little off. Maybe the dog barked and woke them up 10 minutes into their nap. Maybe you were out doing something and it just got skipped because they wouldn’t nap on the go. Whatever the reason is, we don’t need to panic. What I recommend you do is just go ahead and forge ahead to the next nap at its normal time.

So I generally don’t recommend trying to squeeze in a makeup nap if it’s not in the right nap window. Forging ahead, even if it means that we’re pushing a little bit to hit that next nap time is going to set them up to get back on schedule the fastest. So here’s why that works. Your child’s nap schedule is built around their natural sleep rhythm. Ideally, that’s what I want for you. I want their nap schedule to be built around their natural rhythm, which are the times of day when their body is most primed to fall asleep and sleep well.

When you start inserting naps outside of those ideal windows, you’re essentially letting them sleep in what I like to call no man’s land, meaning the window that’s not ideal for them to sleep. It’s not when they typically sleep. And what can happen is that it might feel like a solution to your problem in that moment, but it can actually create more problems than it solves because that random nap that happens in no man’s land can throw off the rest of the day’s sleep rhythm. Or if it was the last nap of the day, it can push bedtime back past the ideal window. So the easiest thing to do, and maybe easy isn’t the right word because it might not feel easy in the moment, but the easiest solution to get things back on track is to forge ahead to the next scheduled nap. And then you’re back on schedule.

But here’s another important detail that goes along with step one. When you do get to that next nap, I want you to maintain your normal wake up cap. So let me give you an example so this is a little more clear. Let’s say your baby is on this three nap schedule and they nap at 9 a.m., 12:30, and 4:15. You normally would wake them up from that last nap by 5 at the latest, assuming they had their typical three nap day. And then that keeps them on schedule to go down at 7 p.m. Now let’s say that 12:30 nap gets skipped entirely, or it’s just 10 minutes long for whatever reason. Now, as I just said, we’d forge ahead to that 4:15 nap.

I guess I’ll make a little slight exception here. I might put them down at four. Sometimes if we have something like a totally skipped midday nap, I’d say you can do it 15 minutes ahead of their typical schedule, but try not to adjust more than 15 minutes. So let’s say you go ahead and you put them down at four. I still want you to wake them by 5 p.m., which is typically where we would cap that final nap. Because if you let them sleep past 5 p.m., then the nap starts to cut into the sleep pressure that we want to build ahead of bedtime. And that can sometimes mean that they have a later bedtime. And then that can impact their night’s sleep. If it doesn’t impact their night’s sleep at a minimum, it usually means they got less night sleep than they typically would. And then we can go into the next day with a still broken sleep rhythm.

So these wake up caps at the end of any of the naps help protect either the next nap window or the bedtime and their night sleep. So I try to maintain those rather than thinking of the next nap being the place where we’re going to make up for a lot of that missed sleep. You might be able to make up for some of it, but whatever your typical cutoff time is, we want to stick with that.

Okay, so let’s say you did what I just recommended, and your child had a skipped or short nap, and then you forged ahead to the next nap and you capped it, you maintained that wake time. And now you have a child who missed out on some of their typical total amount of day sleep.

So, what do we do about that missing day sleep? Where are we going to make up for it? This is where the rescue bedtime comes in. If you haven’t heard episode 236, that’s my dedicated episode to rescue bedtimes, and I’d encourage you to go back and listen to it. But the short version is this a rescue bedtime is simply a bedtime that is 30 to 60 minutes earlier than your child’s usual bedtime. And it is the single most effective tool for handling a skipped nap day or a day where we just know we are short on day sleep.

So again, let me walk you through an example. This time the example is going to be a toddler who takes two naps a day. So let’s say their second nap, their 2 p.m. nap, got skipped, and their normal bedtime would be 7 p.m. Instead of forging ahead to 7 p.m. you could put them down as early as 6, somewhere in that 6 to 6:30 window. And that early bedtime, the quote rescue bedtime, means that your child goes to sleep before they’re even more overtired than they are already from skipping that nap. And that typically allows them to have a smoother bedtime, allows it to be easier for them to fall asleep and easier for them to stay asleep. And it’s giving them the opportunity to tack on 30 to 60 minutes of that missed daytime sleep. We’re tacking it on to the front end of night sleep.

And here’s the part that surprises so many parents every time I talk about this, is that the bedtime that’s 30 to 60 minutes earlier than the typical bedtime should not result in a morning wake up time that is also 30 to 60 minutes earlier. It should mean 30 to 60 minutes more of total night sleep, which means we’ve helped fill in that skipped nap gap. The earlier bedtime should not be robbing them or you of morning sleep. It’s just replacing some of that missed daytime sleep from the day before.

And one last reminder about skipped nap days or crazy short nap days. I don’t want you to panic. One off day is not going to derail everything. It might result in a fussier afternoon. It might result in a trickier pre-bedtime window or a night that feels less smooth or feels more rushed because you’re trying to get them down earlier. But it’s just one day. And the most important thing you can do after a rough nap day is simply get back on schedule the next day. Go back to the typical nap times. Go back to maintaining the sleep windows where we have them nap, and go back to their typical bedtime. And you can still use that rescue bedtime if the next day, for whatever reason, is a little wonky.

When you have that knowledge of what their ideal nap schedule is, and what’s the ideal amount of night sleep they need, you have that to come back to anytime things get thrown off. That’s how we avoid sleep regressions, and we just sometimes have mini resets. So we don’t want to let everything regress, we just quickly reset.

So to wrap up, when a nap gets skipped, forge ahead to the next schedule nap at its typical time. Maybe 15 minutes earlier, but ideally not more than that. If you can avoid the no man’s land naps that are outside of a normal sleep window. Maintain those nap wake-up time caps or cutoffs. And use a rescue bedtime, 30 to 60 minutes earlier than usual, to help your little one make up for some of their missed daytime sleep and avoid getting too overtired before bedtime. One off day is not a crisis. Just reset the next morning and get back on schedule.
And if skipped naps are happening regularly rather than on occasion, and it’s not because you know exactly why, it’s not because you were off doing something unique you wouldn’t normally do, but it just seems like despite your best efforts, your child is skipping naps. That’s a signal worth paying attention to. It might mean that their schedule needs an adjustment or it’s time for a nap transition. And that’s exactly the kind of puzzle that our team loves to help solve.

So, if you need a little extra help, you can always learn more about how we can help you on my website. It’s sleepandwellnesscoach.com. And if this episode was helpful and you know a parent who has been talking about their child skipping naps or their sleep getting thrown off whenever naps aren’t perfect, I hope you will share this episode with them. And as always, thanks for listening. Bye for now.