I'm one hundred percent team schedule, and I'll tell you why. But first, the thing I need you to hear before you read a single time on this page.

Your baby will never follow this perfectly. That's not realistic!

Why? Because babies aren't robots, they're babies. What a schedule gives you is a shape for the day and a reason behind each piece of it, so that when things go sideways you know which bit to move. It's not a test you can fail before 9am.

So with that being said, here's a guide for what a six month old's day looks like when it's working.

The schedule

Short, long, short. That's the shape, and it's the thing to hold onto if you remember nothing else.

A worked example, because times on a page can be hard to translate: if your baby wakes from the lunchtime nap at 2:30pm, and their afternoon awake time is around two hours, you're looking at that short third nap somewhere around 4:30pm, wrapped up by five.

One thing before we go on: awake times aren't evidence-based, and there's no exact number that's correct for your baby. Use these as a starting point and watch your baby's sleepy cues alongside them.

Why the lunchtime nap is the one to protect

This is the part most schedules leave out, and it's the reason the shape isn't arbitrary.

Your baby has biological sleep windows — times during the day when it's genuinely easier for them to fall asleep. Those windows are typically 9 to 10am, and then 12 to 2pm. It's essentially when there's a "lull" in their energy.

So the lunchtime nap isn't the long one because somebody decided it should be. It's the long one because it lands inside the window where your baby's body is most ready for a proper stretch of sleep. Put the big nap there and it tends to work. Put it at 3pm and you'll fight for it.

The same logic runs to the end of the day. Melatonin levels start to rise in the early part of the evening, and that's when your baby has their most sleep pressure — which is why babies genuinely sleep their best and get their deepest sleep in the first half of the night. A sensible bedtime isn't about being strict. It's about not missing the window where the best sleep of the night is available.

For most babies past the newborn stage, that's somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00pm.

The 30 minute morning nap is deliberate

This one confuses a lot of parents, because it looks like a mistake.

A 30 minute morning nap at six months is not a short nap problem. It's a cap, and it's doing a job: it takes the edge off without spending the sleep pressure you need for the lunchtime nap. If you let the morning nap run to an hour and a half, you'll push your whole day back and it can cause an unbalanced day — which can lead to a challenging bedtime.

That's different from a baby whose naps are all short and none of them lengthen, which is a genuine thing to look at by six months.

What surprises parents most

It isn't the sleep. It's the day.

When the shape is right, you get a balanced day you can actually plan around, anchored on that lunchtime nap. You know roughly when you can get out of the house, when lunch is, when you'll have two hours. That's the part people tell me about afterwards — not the nap lengths, the fact that the day feels balanced again.

And the short late nap is doing more work than you think. It isn't there because your baby is tired enough to need it. It's there to stop them getting to bedtime overtired, which is what protects bedtime.

The third nap is the hardest one of the day

If the late afternoon nap is the one you end up fighting for, you're not doing it wrong. It's the hardest nap of the day for almost everybody, and there's a reason for it.

Look back at those biological sleep windows — 9 to 10am, and 12 to 2pm. The third nap doesn't sit inside either of them. Your baby has already had most of their sleep pressure taken off by the first two naps, and the late afternoon isn't a time when their body is naturally pulling them under. So you're asking for sleep at the least favorable moment of the whole day.

Which is exactly why it's capped at 15 to 20 minutes, and why it doesn't need to be a battle. It's a top-up to get them to bedtime in one piece, not a real nap.

To take the pressure off, I would always do this nap in the baby carrier and go for a walk just so that I could make the nap happen.

When the third nap goes

Somewhere between six and eight months, most babies drop to two naps. So plenty of six month olds are already there, and plenty aren't — both are normal.

When it happens, two things change:

The last awake stretch gets a lot longer. It usually jumps from around two and a half hours to about four, which is a big change to make in one step — and it's why the week or two after the transition can feel harder before it gets easier. Much past four hours and you're heading into overtired, which makes falling asleep harder rather than easier.

Bring bedtime forward. This is the one people miss. If the third nap is gone, the day is shorter on sleep, so bedtime needs to move earlier to compensate — not later because they seem fine. A baby who seems fine at 7:30pm on a two-nap day is often running on adrenaline.

Move it gradually, in five, ten or twenty minute steps, rather than shifting the whole thing in one go.

Is your baby anywhere near this?

If you've read that table and your day looks nothing like it, that's ok and it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your baby.

The most usual pattern I see is a baby whose naps are all over the place, a lunchtime nap that only lasts 30 minutes, and a bedtime that has crept later and later because the day keeps collapsing. The schedule looks impossible from there, and what's actually missing is a starting point and an order to do things in.

That's what my 5-18 Months Sleep Program is. It has a schedule for every month right through to 18 months, so you're not trying to guess what changes at seven months and again at nine. It also has a troubleshooting section for when things go wrong — because they do go wrong, and a schedule that only works on a good day isn't much use to anyone.

And it covers the other half: the day structure so they go down at the right time, and responsive settling based on your baby's temperament, so they can get back to sleep without needing you every cycle.

It's 100 minutes of short videos. I've worked with families all around the world, and the ones who get there fastest are the ones who fix the shape of the day first.

Common questions