What is Crib Hour?
Crib Hour - have you heard of it?
I’ve heard this called many things, but crib hour has definitely been the most understood.
Crib hour refers to the amount of time that your child spends in their crib for their nap. Usually this has to do with short naps, but it can pertain to ANY nap.
When parents come to me and they are struggling with their child’s sleep, it is generally from one of 3 things…
Their baby wakes up all night long
Their child wakes up WAY too early in the morning
Their child won’t take naps longer than 20-30 minutes.
Now I can’t solve all of these problems with a simple blog post, but I can definitely help solve ALL of these problems with a sleep package - so if you want to abandon ship and go there right now, click here.
Practicing crib hour will help your child lengthen their short naps.
So what do I actually mean when I say “Crib Hour?”
This means that if you put your child down for a nap at 10am, and they’re awake by 10:30am, I don’t want you to rush in and declare the nap over. I want you to give them some time to see if they’ll go back to sleep. At first, try to wait 10 full minutes to see if maybe they were just in a light stage of sleep - this can mean that they’ll put themselves BACK to sleep. If they haven’t fallen back to sleep after those 10 minutes, then go in and try to comfort them. You can hum a little song, rub their back, stroke their neck, or do anything else that they might love. I would refrain from letting them fall asleep on you since we are practicing something new. Ideally, they fall back to sleep. If they don’t, then I want you to try to keep your child in their crib until the hour is up - so in this example, until 11:30am hits.
The reason why, is that by keeping them in their crib for the full hour, you are quite literally training their internal body clock to understand that the minimum nap length is 1 hour long. So that even if they do wake early, they can either put themselves back to sleep, or lightly babble away since they know they’re in there for 60 minutes. Of course, babies can’t tell time, but their internal body clock is real.
The more you practice crib hour, the better your baby will begin to nap.
One thing to note, is that if your child wakes up early from a nap and they aren’t crying, then I’d like you to leave them in the crib until their nap-time is over. This gets them used to their sleep environment and it also encourages a longer resting period.
However, I DO want you to START their awake time from when you take them OUT of the crib. Not necessarily when they wake up from their nap. This also encourages a longer nap since their sleep pressure will be higher.
As always, if you’ve tried this out with little success and you need some serious help on how to get your baby sleeping better - you’re in the right place.
Bailey
