Making changes to daytimes with your baby for the sake of better sleep begins with small steps

Sometimes simply increasing the amount of sensory motor nourishment that your baby is exposed to during the day in itself decreases the amount of daytime sleep she wants to take. At other times, and especially if your baby is older or you have excessive night waking, you may decide you need to actively work with the pressure point of daytime naps. In this case

• Try not focus on the time of day when naps happen. Sleep comes whenever your baby’s sleep pressure is high, sometimes in the car seat, sometimes at the breast or bottle, sometimes in the pram or stroller or carrier.

• Try to nudge back nap time when you see it coming on, by letting her sleep pressure build for ten or fifteen minutes longer than you usually would. You'd do this by using an extra high dose of sensory nourishment, one of your baby-sleep superpowers! This could be

  • A burst of highly physical play, such as lifting your baby in the air or swinging her around

  • Watching close up as older children play in the park

  • Splashing water, at the bubbler in the park or tap in the back yard or in the kitchen sink (none of which requires much water wastage, just intermittent excited and noisy splashes). Or similar exciting play appropriate to your own climate, in the snow or the autumn leaves or dirt in the garden. There's so much, once you start to think about it, that you could use to satisfy your baby's sensory motor hunger for that extra ten minutes when you're nudging against the sleep pressure.

The dilemma is that if you try to nudge back the time your baby starts a daytime nap by too much all at once, you may find your baby becomes very fussy! You'll experiment with finding a balance. Letting sleep pressure rise higher than you normally would is not about being unkind to your baby.

You'll know when it's time to use a feed, your other baby-sleep superpower, to tip your little one over into sleep. But it is possible, with high doses of rich sensory adventure, to let your baby's sleep pressure rise that little bit higher, nap by nap, day by day, over the two weeks of the reset.

This way, depending on your baby and your own situation, four naps might become three, three naps become two, two naps become one - and sometimes, the one last daytime nap might need to be dropped altogether. Or you might have decided you need to shorten the single daytime nap, gradually over time, from say two and a half hours to no more than one hour, or whatever seems right in your situation.

Babies often need much less daytime sleep than we think, once we experiment with keeping their sensory tank as full as possible.

Taking small steps even when you don't especially feel like it to do the things that you've decided matter in life with your baby is a powerful way to make change.