Napping

My baby is a month old, and she’s a terrible napper. How did you get your baby to nap?

Our Mommy MD Guide’s reply:  When my twins were first born, they took 10- to 15-minute catnaps. It drove me crazy. One mistake I made was making my house too quiet for naptimes. I’d require it to be dead silent! I think that backfired a bit because as the twins got older, they had to have silence to sleep.

To try to get them to nap longer, I’d put them down at the scheduled naptime for a couple of hours. It was a bit like sleep training; they cried some but then they fell asleep. It started to get better once I put them into their cribs for naps, rather than letting them fall asleep in the living room in their swings.

—Ann Contrucci, MD, a mom of 12-year-old boy-girl twins who works as a pediatric emergency room physician in Atlanta, GA