The Nightstand · runs in your browser

Nap Transition Checker

Set your baby's age, tick what you are seeing, and this says which nap transition she is near and whether the signs are strong enough to act on yet. It is as willing to tell you to wait as it is to tell you to drop a nap, which is more than most of this genre will do.

No account, no email, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

What you are seeing this week
Nothing here is scored as a symptom. The first one carries most of the weight, because a fortnight of the same behaviour is the only thing that reliably separates a transition from a bad week.
Where she is on the ladder
Near the three-to-two transition

Nine months sits inside the band where most babies come down to two naps. Nothing is ticked yet, though, so there is nothing here to act on — being the right age is not a reason to drop a nap, it is only a reason to stop being surprised when the day starts changing.

The rule this page keeps coming back to: wait for two weeks of the same thing before you change the day. Under a fortnight, teeth, a cold, a growth spurt, a week away and a newly learned skill all look exactly like a nap being outgrown.

Pointing at a transition
0 of 5
Pointing at a rough patch instead
0 of 3
The four rungs, as age bands
Four naps down to three3–5 months
Three naps down to two6–9 months
Two naps down to one13–18 months
The last nap goes30–48 months

Usually the messiest. Two naps do not yet stretch far enough to reach bedtime, so for a few weeks the day has too much awake time in it however you arrange it. A very early bedtime is the tool for this one — the gap the third nap used to fill has to go somewhere, and the front of the night is the cheapest place to put it.

Every band above is an estimate compiled from published total-sleep figures and the nap counts babies of each age usually keep, and the ranges are wide because that is the honest shape of them. No health body publishes a nap-transition schedule, so nothing here is quoted from one.

What this is. A read on what you have told it, and nothing more. It cannot see your baby, it is not counting symptoms, and no publisher this site may cite prints a rule for when a nap should go — so the age bands are estimates compiled from published sleep totals and the ranges around them are deliberately wide. Two babies at the same month, with the same list ticked, can genuinely need different days.

What it refuses to do. It will not tell you to drop a nap on the strength of a bad week, and it will say so plainly when the timing looks far more like a fortnight around a developmental leap than a nap outgrown. It attaches no month to sleeping through the night, has no opinion on any sleep-training method, and contains no AI — it is a slider, seven checkboxes and some plain rules you can read above.

Safe sleep first, whatever the day looks like. Every nap and every night happens the same way: on their back, on a firm flat surface, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys, in your room for at least the first six months. Nothing weighted goes on or over a sleeping baby. If your baby is very hard to settle, unusually sleepy, feeding poorly or something simply feels wrong to you, that is a call to your pediatrician or health visitor rather than a nap problem — and none of this is medical advice.

How this is worked out

  1. You give it two things: your baby's age in whole months, and which of the six signs you are actually seeing this week. Both are read in the browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
  2. The age decides which rung of the ladder you are near. The four rungs are drawn on the page as broad, overlapping age bands rather than birthdays, because they overlap in real life: the 3-to-2 band and the 2-to-1 band between them cover most of the first eighteen months, and plenty of babies sit in two at once.
  3. The signs are weighted rather than counted. Fighting the same nap for two weeks or more is the one that carries real weight, because a fortnight of the same behaviour is what separates a transition from a bad week. Everything else — an early morning, a longer bedtime, a shorter nap — happens for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with how many naps your baby needs.
  4. If your age sits inside one of the windows where sleep commonly falls apart around a developmental leap, and what you are seeing is mostly night waking rather than refused naps, the page says so and declines to recommend dropping anything. Dropping a nap during a fortnight of disrupted nights usually makes the fortnight worse.
  5. The result is a read, not an instruction. There is no published rule for when to drop a nap — no publisher this site may cite prints one — so what you get is the shape of the evidence for and against, plus the sentence that matters most: wait for two weeks of the same thing before you change the day.
Questions

The short answers

The reliable one is time: the same nap refused, or cut short, or fought for two weeks or more. On its own, any single sign means very little. A baby who suddenly skips the last nap of the day, takes forty minutes to settle at bedtime she used to fall into, or starts waking at half past five is telling you something — but teeth, a cold, a growth spurt, a new skill she has just learned to practise in the cot and a fortnight of travel all produce exactly the same list. That is why this page asks how long it has been going on before it says anything.
The bands are wide and they overlap. Most babies get down to two naps somewhere between about six and nine months, and down to one somewhere between about thirteen and eighteen months, with the last nap of all going anywhere from around two and a half to past four. Those are ranges compiled from the total-sleep guidance and the nap counts babies of each age usually keep, not a published schedule — nobody this site may cite prints one. A baby at the early edge of a band and a baby at the late edge are both ordinary.
Longer than anybody wants and not in a straight line. Expect a stretch of weeks where some days work with the old number of naps and some days do not, which is why the usual advice is to keep both days available rather than switching overnight. Nothing here can tell you a number of weeks, because no source publishes one. What you can do is bring bedtime earlier on the days the nap is skipped, and stop reading the day as a failure when it goes sideways.
Usually you get a couple of rough weeks and then you put the nap back, and no harm is done. A baby who is not ready tends to arrive at bedtime past the point of settling easily, wake early the next morning and be even less able to manage the longer day — which reads as proof that everything is broken and is really just proof that it was too soon. Putting the nap back is allowed. So is trying again in a month.
It is worth ruling out, and this page will say so when the timing fits. Sleep commonly comes apart for a few weeks around the points where babies learn to roll, sit, crawl, pull up, walk and talk, and separation anxiety adds nights of its own from the second half of the first year until somewhere near the second birthday. If the naps are broadly fine and it is the nights that have fallen over, dropping a nap is unlikely to be the answer and is quite likely to make the fortnight harder.
In this browser only, so you do not have to set it up again in three days when you check whether anything has changed. One local-storage key, no account, no server, nothing sent anywhere. The Clear button under the checklist deletes it.

Where this comes from

  1. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (PubMed Central) (2016). Recommended Amount of Sleep for Pediatric Populations: A Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4877308/
  2. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2024). Healthy Sleep Habits: How Many Hours Does Your Child Need?. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/healthy-living/sleep/Pages/healthy-sleep-habits-how-many-hours-does-your-child-need.aspx
  3. NHS (2025). Helping your baby to sleep. https://www.nhs.uk/baby/caring-for-a-newborn/helping-your-baby-to-sleep/
  4. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2022). Separation Anxiety and Sleeping. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/healthy-living/sleep/Pages/separation-anxiety-and-sleeping.aspx
  5. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2021). Movement Milestones: Babies 8 to 12 Months. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/Pages/Movement-8-to-12-Months.aspx
  6. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2022). How to Keep Your Sleeping Baby Safe: AAP Policy Explained. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/sleep/Pages/A-Parents-Guide-to-Safe-Sleep.aspx
  7. NHS (2025). Reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). https://www.nhs.uk/baby/caring-for-a-newborn/reduce-the-risk-of-sudden-infant-death-syndrome/

Every link above was opened and read when this page was last updated. Snuggle is not affiliated with any of these organisations and none of them has reviewed this page. Nothing here is medical advice.

Go deeper

The reading behind this page

Sleep, by age · 9 min read

The 4 to 3 Nap Transition

The fourth nap is a catnap, and it goes because the day has run out of room for it — not because a birthday arrived.

Read it Sleep, by age · 9 min read

The 3 to 2 Nap Transition

The third nap is the late-afternoon one, and it is being squeezed by a baby who can now stay awake for nearly three hours — but at this age the nights are worth ruling out first.

Read it Sleep, by age · 10 min read

The 2 to 1 Nap Transition

The day loses a whole sleep at an age when the child has opinions about it — which is why this one takes weeks, and why an early bedtime carries the whole thing.

Read it Sleep, by age · 9 min read

When Do Toddlers Stop Napping?

Anywhere from about two and a half to past four — and the nap does not disappear so much as convert into an earlier bedtime.

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Next door

Baby Sleep Schedule Generator

Your baby's age and this morning's wake-up, drawn as a day: naps and bedtime as windows, widening through the afternoon the way real days do.

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Sleep Regression Timeline

The famous ages, one at a time: what is genuinely developing then, what tends to happen to the nights, and what nobody can actually tell you.

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Wake Window Calculator

Your baby's age in months, and the awake time to expect before the next sleep — drawn as a band, with the whole by-age table underneath it.

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The app this site is for

Snuggle does this with your baby’s own pattern.

This page works from an age band, because an age band is all a web page knows about you. Snuggle starts from the same bands and then blends them with what your baby actually did today — how long she lasted, when she went down, how the last nap ran — and shows on the face of the ring how sure it is. Early estimates say they are early.

It logs sleep, feeds, nappies and growth in one tap on a dim red screen, and every caregiver in the household is on the same timeline in their own account. The arithmetic runs on the phone, on your baby’s own history. There are no AI features in it.

In development for iPhone and Android. Not released yet — when it is, it will be on this site.

What Snuggle is