Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy young kids: age drop last nap?

Hmmmm. Complicated.

DD has never been what I'd call a "good sleeper." Some of that is medically explainable, but not all.

When she was well:

Napped until about 30 months-- but only to a total of about 9-10 hours of sleep every 24, which was only about an hour less than she'd ever done. We did sometime enforce "quiet" time, which is a self-defense mechanism when you have a kid that sleeps this little.

We never had a time when she did two naps. I was very confused when I'd read or hear about that. LOL.

For many years, her sleep needs drifted gradually lower-- until she hit a low at about 12yo of around 7 hrs nightly.

She's now into that teenaged-zombie mode where they'll sleep for 10-11 hours. Mostly, we try to make sure that she gets a solid 8 hours and call it good (which it seems to be).

I'm so glad to hear someone else say this. DD8 (who is a DYS) napped up until the week before she started kindergarten, at 5.5 years old. DS4 still naps, sometimes for 3-4 hours a day.

Which is not to say that your child might not be ready to give it up. Good luck if you have him in daycare, because they may not be able to handle it at all.

Ds5.5 most days until about 4, occasionally until about 4.5. Until he was about four he could sleep 3 hours until 4 then go back to bed at 6.30 then sleep until 5.30 to 6.30 the next morning. He still is often asleep by 7 and sleeps 11 to 12 hours a day. I don't remember when he dropped his morning sleep. Ds3.5 dropped his morning sleep about one and his other mostly by 2. On the rare occasion he slept he would be awake until 10.30 or 11. He is quite happy on 10 hours sleep.

Thanks so much to everyone who posted. This has been really interesting to read. I know that all kids are individuals. Just comforting to read other experiences. If he naps, he is up until 11+ so maybe I should just try quiet time. I enjoy the nap, quiet time even if he doesn't. :-)

I stopped naps with my youngest at 18 months because she was up until 11pm or 12am if she napped...even if she just fell asleep in the car. Even with a nap, she would sing to herself until 10pm most nights. She always woke with the sun at that age, too. She seemed to just need less sleep than the rest of us.

She is 10yo now and still is a night owl but she will sleep until 8am or so most days.

DD8 stopped somewhere in the 2-3 range, and slept about 11 hours a night then. We didn't have a schedule, because too many factors might influence her need that would be beyond our control... whether she fell asleep in the car earlier, the quality of her sleep the night before, level of activity, health issues, etc. Anytime we'd notice a sharp deterioration in her behavior, that was a signal she was ready to nap.

Along the way, she got to be pretty good at self-regulating. She began announcing to us that she was ready to take a nap, at around six months of age, with a made-up word.

I'm an evangelist about this, I know, but protect sleep as much as you can. The literature on its importance is absolutely stunning. I know there seems to evidence that gifted kids may need less, but I'm not personally all that convinced of that--I think they just work harder to stay awake, in many cases.

Also, many people don't know this, but teens need at least 9 and hopefully 10 hours a night or so per the literature. Sleep needs increase at that age, and sleep cycle shifts.

Literature and research on sleep is quite confident in speaking about the middle cluster; actually much research into children has that particular skew. We're in the game here with outliers in the first place and research into gifted sleep patterns shows a much flatter distribution of sleep needed. One reference places about 20% of gifted kids needing significantly more sleep and about 20% needing significantly less sleep.

Anecdotally it sounds fine to say that kids keep themselves up by dint of will, but my parents' experience ran counter to that. I was sleeping 5-6 hours a night by age 9. If I went to sleep at 9pm, I was awake at 3 in the morning. I spent a lot of my childhood mornings playing for a couple or more hours while everyone else slept.

Yes, sleep needs DO increase (temporarily, usually) in adolescence. We've seen (and respected) this pattern, though as Zen Scanner notes, our DD seems to need 10-20% less sleep than most of her peers.

I'd add that some of this seems to be genetic. Low sleep needs seem to run on my side of the family, particularly in the women. I always take those kind of genetic quirks into account with physiological stuff like this.


We always know when our DD isn't getting enough sleep. It definitely shows, and we have (even at 11-13yo) sent her to BED when her behavior crashes in a big way and we suspect that sleep deprivation is at the bottom of it. I highly recommend that approach, actually, with a child who becomes prone to power struggles when tired.

A typical day for DS3 is a two hour nap (3-5 pm) and 7 hours at night (11 pm to 6 am). We tried giving up nap time but he still only slept 7 hours (8 pm to 3 am) and we were all miserable. He only slept in 3 hr stretches at night up until he was almost 3 when he finally started doing 6 - 7 at a time.

DD3 days hasn't really woken up yet, she just nurses and goes right back to sleep, so we'll see what happens there, but so far I'm thrilled.