Sleeping Issues with a 3-Year Old

When my daughter was 3 she still took as long as a nap that she needed. If he is waking up by himself then that means that he is getting enough sleep. The hitting issue is somthing totally different. It has nothing to do with him being tired. No matter how tired you are that does not give him the right to hit and if you start deffending him now with the thought that if I am tired I can be cranky and hit, it will only get worse when he is older.

well i have a 6 year old son and a soon to be step son hes 2 will be 3 in nov. i cut my sons nap out at the age of maybe 2 or a little bit sooner and he got to where when he took a nap he would wake up in a very bad mood so that stoped.now my soon to be 3 year old i cut his naps out already because he was doing like your 3 year old went to bed a/b 8 or so and would get up around 4 or 5 and when i cut his naps out he will sleep till a/b 6 or 7 now i have heard that a child and babys need at least 10 to 12 hours asleep a night my son thats 6 hes in the first grade and he gets 10 1/2 asleep a night and my 3 year old gets a/b the same now since i cut out the naps im not for sure if that helped you out any but i hope it does if u want to chat some times my screen name on aol is onesexychickis21 and on yahoo its butterflygirl35957

My son will be 3 this week and he still takes a 2-3 hour nap from about Noon. He really gets cranky without one. I also let him stay up until 9 or 9:30. I know that people say 8 for bed time, but he was getting up at 4 and 5 when my husband went to work and sometimes twice during the night. I also found that when he was getting up in the night he would be so quiet that I couldn't hear him and would take his stool around and turn on all the lights in the house. The lights would wake me up. It worried me that he would try to unlock the doors or something and I wouldn't hear him so I had to do something to help keep him in the bed. Now he sleeps til about 7am. If your son is getting atleast 8 hours af sleep that may be all he needs. I believe that kids need naps so it's not a good idea to cut them out. My daughter came home and took naps until the 1st grade. She used to sleep for 12 hour straight from 6 weeks on and still will. I think she just needed more sleep. I had a hard time getting my son to sleep through the night in the first place. I feel for you being sleep deprived times two. Good luck.

My two oldest boys are 4 and 3 years old. I lay them down for their naps at 1 o'clock and they sleep for 2 to 3 hours. They both go to bed between 8 and 9 o'clock and both sleep through the night. My 3 year old gets up around 7 or 7:30 and normally wakes my 4 year old up because they share a room. So no I don't recommend giving up on nap time. Especially considering the fact that you are a stay home mom. That's your time when the kid(s) are sleeping.

Hi L.-my daughter is 6 years old but she took naps all the way thru kindergarten so don't worry so much about the naps as sleeping at night-she always slept an average of 8-10 hours a night with a 2 hour nap sometime in the mid-afternoon. If he wakes after 8 hours, I just don't think you're gonna get anymore. I never could with my daughter-she would never go back to sleep if she'd been sleeping at least 8 hours. Sounds normal to me-my only suggestion would be to put him to bed at 9. Mine sleeps 9-6:30 to this day and I've been putting her to bed at 9 since she was an infant. It works for us anyway. Good luck and god bless.

I went through the same thing with my daughter what I would suggest is only one nap after lunch and don't let him sleep for more than 3 hours if he doesn't like it it will be somethign he will eventually get used too because if he goes to school they are only allowed to keep them asleep for so long as well. Thsi way if he is only taking one nap he will be more tired and you could put him down earlier and he will most likely sleep later. But in a about a year he probably wont' take naps anymore and what I did with my daughter when she started fighting the naps i made her at least lay on the couch and put some classical or soft music on with no tv and told her she had to rest for at least one hour, most times she fell asleep when she started getting a little older and now she is almost six on the weekends after lunch i tell her that she has to lay on the couch either reading or watching tv whatever she needed to do to get her to stay on the couch and just rest, depending on how tired she is she usually falls asleep but i will make her lay there for one hour then she can get up to play.

honestly, a 3 hr nap is too long at 3. 1.5-2 hrs is as long as he needs, try laying him down early (you didnt say what time he takes his naps) if hes really sleepy by 10, try getting him to lie down by 9 or 9:30..if he wakes before noon and doesnt sleep as long, he should sleep longer...bad news, all 3 of my kids were up by 5 am, starting around 2 and didnt begin to sleep later until they were in school.

Hi L. how long has your 3yr old been waking like this? Do you think some of it might have to do with having a baby and how they wake up throughout the night that maybe this has messed his schedule up. I will tell you this the naps have nothing to do with him waking up. My daughter is soon to be 4yrs old and she generally goes to bed between 8-9 takes a two hour nap at daycare and I have to wake her up around 6:30-7am. Although my daughter did go through a phase when she did wake up early I just let her crawl into bed with me and she usually just went back to sleep. Have you tried just letting him in the bed with you instead of you getting up and walking him back to his room? I also have a tv in my room and times when my daughter would get up too early and wouldn't go back to sleep I just let her lay in bed with me and I turned some cartoons on for her, which would buy me some more sleep time and sometimes she would end up falling back to sleep too.

When my son was about that age (6 now) he would get up that early too. But I found out he was taking a 2 hr. nap at daycare. So instead of me putting him to bed so early when I got home, it gave us time to play a game or just spend more time together. I just put him to bed an hr. or so later and he got up when I did. I know there are docs. that will criticize for putting your child to bed at 9, but it worked for us. My son loves to sleep now and will go to bed at 8:30 and sleep until he get's up for school. On the weekends he gets to sleep in a bit, but not too much, I don't want to mess his schedule up. Good luck!

my 3 1/2 yr old little girl gave up her naps about 6 months ago. she'll still fall asleep if we are in the car but wakes up as soon as it stops. she goes to bed between 6:30 & 7pm, closer to 6:30 & gets up between 5 & 6, sadly closer to 5.
when i put her to bed later she gets up even earlier!!! if she seems very tired i put her down aropund 6 & she'll normally sleep thru to 6am.
i know it's not fun but you might want to try it for the sake of a little more sleep.

Well, I have a two girls, 4 and 3 and my 4 year old gave up naps on her own and then my 3 year old did too. Now they go to bed around 7 or 8 and sleep til 7. No naps works a lot better for me. But if he needs a nap then I would limit the nap to an hour and the first couple of days he will probably cry and not want to, my girls did that to sometimes when I woke them from a nap but soon he'll get the hang of it and it will just become routine. Then if he has shorter naps he will probably sleep longer. My 4 year old used to take 3 hour naps and then woke up at night or really early and I started cutting her naps down to an hour and then she just gave them up after awhile. So now they wake up at 7 and they play or go to school on those days and they come home and we play and eat dinner and then around 7 they lay down and go to sleep and sleep til 7 or so. I love our schedule now. I don't really get a break during the day but I get a break when they go to bed early. I hope this helps a little. Just cut his naps down to an hour and he'll begin to get it and it will become routine. You might have to deal with crying the first couple of days but after that it's worth it.

Hi, I'm a mom of 3 and a grandmother of 3. My suggestion would be to get a notebook and start logging incidents for say a week of wake times, sleep times, if he is irritable, what he eats and when. And talk with your pediatrician. Just to rule out that nothing else is going on such as drop in blood sugar.

Some children just do not sleep as much as others. I found when my children were young that if I sqeezed in 30 minutes for me, my reactions were clearer, and I could handle most anything.