Making changes to daytimes with your toddler for the sake of better sleep begins with tiny steps

If you decide to have your toddler sleep less during the day, to better consolidate sleep at night, it helps to make the changes slowly. If you try to nudge back the time your toddler starts a daytime nap too quickly, for instance, you may find your child becomes very grumpy!

Sometimes simply increasing the amount of sensory motor nourishment that your toddler is exposed to during the day in itself decreases the amount of sleep she takes during the day. At other times, especially if your child is older and you have excessive night waking, you may decide to decrease the amount of time your little one spends napping during the day, so that sleep is better consolidated at nights. In this case

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

• Try to nudge back nap time when you see it coming on, by letting her sleep pressure build for ten or 15 minutes longer than you usually would. You'd do this by using an extra high dose of sensory motor nourishment, one of your toddler-sleep superpowers! This could be

  • Playing in the backyard or 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 a small child's sensory motor hunger for that extra ten minutes when you're nudging against the sleep pressure

  • A burst of highly physical play, if you've got the energy, such as lifting her in the air or swinging her around.

Letting sleep pressure rise higher than you normally would is not about being unkind to your child! You will know when it's time to use one of your superpowers (often a feed if you're breastfeeding) to tip your little one over into sleep. But it is possible, with a high dose of rich sensory adventure, to let your little one'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 child and your own situation, three naps become two, two naps become one - and sometimes, the one last daytime nap may need to be dropped altogether. Or you might have decided you need to shorten the single daytime nap, gradually over time, for example from two hours to no more than one hour. You'll experiment your way through, depending on your own toddler's unique needs.

Toddlers often need much less daytime sleep than we think, once we experiment and better fill their sensory tank.

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 toddler is a powerful way to make change.