Starting daycare: what to expect from sleep
Nursery starts next month and you are worried about what it will do to sleep. It will make it worse for a while, and knowing roughly how long stops you from dismantling everything in week two.
3 min read
Three things arrive at once. The days become far more stimulating and tiring. Naps in a shared room are usually shorter than at home. And there is genuine emotional adjustment to being somewhere new without you, which shows up at bedtime and in the night.
Then the colds start. The first term at nursery is one virus after another, and each one costs a few nights.
What to expect
Short naps at nursery for the first month. Thirty or forty minutes where there used to be ninety. It improves as they habituate.
More night waking, and more clinginess. Both at bedtime and at three in the morning. This is adjustment, not a settling problem.
Exhaustion by the end of the week. Thursday and Friday are much harder than Monday for the first month or two.
Illness, repeatedly. Six to eight colds in the first year is normal and is not a sign anything is wrong.
What helps
Early bedtime, aggressively. On nursery days it may need to be an hour earlier than usual for the first month, and that is the single most useful thing you can do.
Practise the conditions beforehand: loosen the blackout for naps for a fortnight before starting, let some noise in, and if possible do a few short settling-in sessions. Send the same sleeping bag and, for children over a year, the same comforter. Keep the home routine absolutely unchanged - it is the one constant in a week where everything else is new.
And keep weekends close to weekday timings, within half an hour. A wildly different weekend makes Monday and Tuesday worse.
Bedtime an hour earlier on nursery days does more than any other adjustment available to you.
How long
Four to six weeks for most children to settle into the new pattern, sometimes a full term. Naps improve gradually. Night sleep usually recovers once the days stop being overwhelming.
This is a poor time to start settling work or to make any other change - no room moves, no cot-to-bed, no night weaning. Wait until the adjustment is done.
The settling-in period
Use it properly if the nursery offers one. A few short sessions building up over a week or two, ideally with you present for the first couple, does more for how the first month goes than anything you can arrange at home.
Where possible, start nursery a week before you go back to work rather than on the same day. That week absorbs the settling-in, the first cold, and the discovery that getting a baby out of the house takes forty minutes longer than you estimated - none of which you want to meet in week one of a new routine at work.
The illness that comes with it
Six to eight colds in the first year at nursery is normal and is not a sign of a weak immune system or a poor setting. Each one costs a few nights, and in the first term it can feel like one continuous illness with brief gaps.
Plan for it rather than being surprised. Do not schedule anything demanding - no settling work, no night weaning, no room moves - in the first term. And go back to the normal routine promptly after each illness rather than waiting for a clear week, because the clear week may be a while coming.
When to stop troubleshooting
Talk to the room leader if your child is not napping at all after two months or seems distressed rather than tired. Speak to your health visitor about persistent exhaustion, a change in development or mood, or sleep that is deteriorating steadily rather than settling.
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