Nap log

Today's status

Mark today as sick or travel and it'll be excluded from your trend heatmap and rolling-7-day median, so one off day doesn't drag the picture for the rest of the week.

Wake windows

The "wake window" is how long baby is awake between sleeps. Most short, choppy naps trace back to a window that ran too long (overtired) or too short (undertired). Both ends of the band cause the same problem from different directions.

Bands are typical for the age; your baby will sit somewhere in the range, not on the average. Watch tiredness signs — yawns, eye rubs, ear pulls — over the clock.

Dark room & white noise

The cheapest two fixes parents try first: a room dark enough that you can't see your hand at arm's length, and continuous white noise at the volume of a running shower (around 50 dB at the crib). Both reduce the work baby has to do to stay asleep.

If only one improves, that's still useful information about which factor matters more for your baby.

Full daytime feeds

Babies who graze through the day often wake at night to make up the calories. Most pediatricians describe a pattern of fewer, fuller feeds during waking hours as the precondition for longer night stretches — not a guarantee, but a precondition.

If feeds aren't going well, that's the conversation to have with your pediatrician or a feeding specialist before adjusting sleep.

Why scheduling matters

Sleep pressure builds while baby is awake and dissipates while they're asleep. Naps that come too early waste pressure that hasn't built yet; naps that come too late hit a cortisol-driven second wind that makes settling harder, not easier. The schedule is just an estimate of where the pressure window probably is for your baby's age — the tracker is for finding the offset between the estimate and reality.

When settling gets hard

If multiple naps in a row are hard to settle, the foundational variables to check before changing the schedule are: room darkness, white noise, and whether the wake window before the nap was in range. Schedule changes are easier to evaluate after those are stable.

If hard settling is paired with arching, refusing to lie flat, or feeding aversion, that's a pediatrician conversation — not a schedule fix.

What to expect

Sleep training timelines vary widely. The published trials on sleep-training methods (Gradisar 2016, Hiscock 2008 and its 5-year follow-up) enrolled motivated, screened families and still showed outcomes spread across many weeks. Some babies respond inside two weeks. Others take longer. A meaningful minority don't respond to a given method and need a different approach — or, occasionally, a medical workup.

The honest framing is: most families see directional improvement, the timeline isn't predictable, and "not responding by week N" is data, not a verdict on you or your baby.

If you find yourself reading prescriptive timelines online and feeling worse, that's a sign to step back from the timeline and check the foundational variables instead.

What the research says

The most-cited modern sleep-training trials enrolled motivated families screened for medical exclusions — useful for ranges, not for verdicts. Quantified outcomes from the strongest trials:

• Time to night-waking consolidation: Gradisar 2016 (RCT, n=43, ages 6–16 months) reported the average family seeing measurable change within ~2 weeks, with individual responses spread across the trial's full window. Most published reviews cluster the typical response at roughly 1–4 weeks; meaningful tails extend beyond that on both ends.
• Sleep-problem resolution rate: Hiscock 2008 (n=328, modified extinction in primary care) found ~63% of intervention families reporting fewer night wakings at 2 months, vs ~46% in the control group. The gap narrowed by 4 months and was statistically equivalent at 12 months — i.e. the intervention sped up resolution but didn't change the eventual baseline.
• Long-term outcomes: Price 2012 (5-year follow-up of the Hiscock cohort) found no measurable difference in sleep, child behaviour, parent–child attachment, or maternal mental health at 6 years vs control — currently the strongest published reassurance on long-term harm.
• Non-response rate: Across pooled trials, roughly 10–15% of families don't see meaningful change with a given method. That isn't failure — it's data, and often signals either a different method is a better fit or a pediatrician conversation is the next step.

Trial caveats matter: enrolled families were motivated, had babies screened against major medical exclusions (reflux, allergic colitis, neurodevelopmental flags), and had clinical contact during the study. Real-world results sit in a wider distribution than these numbers describe — the trial ranges are a useful floor for expectations, not a ceiling.