Looking for an optimal 7-month-old sleep schedule for your baby? Here’s a sample sleep schedule with feeding and sleeping for your 7-month old!
I love working with 7-month-olds in my sleep training business! They’ve gone through so many exciting milestones, and are really starting to show off their personalities.
Babies at this age are able to stay awake longer, show so much personality, may be ready to drop night feeds, and are ready to establish more regular and reliable daily routines.
Who doesn’t love a good routine? I know I thrive on predictability!
7-month-olds are primed and ready to settle into a daily routine that you can all rely on on for the next handful of months.
Let’s walk through the most important elements of a 7-month-old sleep schedule and help your family settle into a routine that works for everyone!
Eliminate Short Naps with a Predictable Sleep Routine
Take away the stress of figuring out your baby’s sleep needs. With the Baby Sleep Schedule Binder, you’ll get sleeping and feeding schedules that you can implement for every age, even if you currently have no routine in place. Check out the Baby Sleep Schedule Binder here.
What is a Good Schedule for a 7-Month-Old?
Compared to the early months of their life, there’s a lot more activity to fit into your 7 month old’s days!
Your baby is much more physically active, playing with toys and working on rolling over or even starting the early stages of crawling.
You’ve also probably introduced solid food, so there’s a lot more feeding time in the day than there used to be.
If you’ve managed to avoid making feeding a sleep association by using an eat-play-sleep routine in those earlier months, that’s great! Make sure that you keep your feedings 30 minutes or more from nap and bed time.
If your baby has grown accustomed to nursing to sleep, don’t worry! I can help you break the feed-to-sleep association. Check out my post on how to stop nursing to sleep, broken down by each age.
At 7 months old, many babies are ready to transition from 3 to 2 naps. If you haven’t transitioned from three naps to two yet, here are some tips on how to drop the third nap.
And finally, your baby could hit a 6 month sleep regression between 6 to 8 months of age. This is largely related to all of those new skills and developmental milestones they’ve been working on!
Stay consistent in your approach and the regression should leave just as quickly as it came!
All in all, the ideal 7-month-old schedule will include a couple of naps, time spent exploring new solid foods, plenty of playtime activity, and lots of fun for baby and new parents!
The 7-Month-Old Schedule Sweet Spot
You know what’s even better than all the new awake-time activities in your baby’s day? A reliable routine!
The 7-month mark is generally the time that your baby’s nap schedule will settle into some consistency for several months.
I like to call this the 7-month sweet spot.
Up until this point, your baby’s wake windows have been changing fairly often. Just when you thought you hit a groove, and had your baby’s sleep schedule down, your baby was ready to stay awake for a little longer!
But once you transition to two naps around the 7-month mark, you and your baby should be able to enjoy some regularly-scheduled programming for the rest of their first year!
How Long Can a 7-Month-Old Stay Awake?
Your baby’s ability to stay awake for longer stretches of time changes as they grow and develop. These stretches of time are called your baby’s wake windows.
Up until this point, your baby has likely been taking three naps each day. The amount of time they’ve spent awake probably capped out around 2.5 hours at most.
But eventually the wake window for 7-month-olds stretches to between 2.5 and 3.5 hours at a time.
Babies usually have their shortest wake window at the beginning of the day, before they go down for their first nap time. That means the first wake window might be as short as 2.5 hours after they wake up in the morning, with about a 3-hour wake window before they go down for their second nap.
The maximum amount of time that your 7 month old should stay awake is 3.5 hours. If you stretch it any longer than that, you might be dealing with an overtired baby at bed time.
Sample 7-Month-Old Schedule
Here is my favorite sleep schedule for 7 month old babies after they’ve transitioned to two naps.
Wake time is distributed nicely throughout the day, and your baby should take two solid naps!
7:00 am: Wake up + nurse or bottle
8:30 am: Solids/Breakfast
9:30 to 11:00 am: Nap
11:00 am: Nurse or bottle
12:00 pm: Solids/Lunch
1:30 pm: Small nurse or bottle (if needed)
2:00 to 3:30 pm: Nap
3:30 pm: Nurse or bottle
5:30 pm: Solids/Dinner
6:30 pm: Start baby’s bedtime routine + nurse or bottle
7:00 pm: Bedtime
How Much Sleep Do 7-Month-Olds Need?
7-month-olds should get about 12-16 hours of sleep each day. That includes night time sleep and naps together.
Since sleep begets sleep, naps are a big part of the sleep equation at this age. It’s so important for your baby to get the sleep they need during the day in order to sleep well at night!
For 7-month-olds, we want to try to aim for 2 to 4 hours of daytime sleep each day.
If you’ve recently transitioned your baby from three naps to two, there might be some days when they’ll need an extra cat nap to make it to bed time.
This is especially true if your baby takes short naps and isn’t able to extend their sleep cycle.
Know that you might have some days with two solid naps and some days with three shorter naps as you make the 3 to 2 nap transition.
Another good idea and option to help your baby through this transitional time is to bump up bedtime 30-60 minutes to avoid over-tiredness at the end of the day.
As your baby grows and approaches 8 months old, their two naps will become more reliable and they’ll settle in to the two-nap routine.
How Long Should a 7-Month-Old Sleep at Night?
As long as your 7-month-old is getting the daytime sleep they need, they should be able to sleep about 10 to 12 hours at night, for about 12 to 15 hours of total sleep in a 24-hour period.
For most families, your baby’s morning wake up time in the morning will be the most impactful part of their schedule—it sets the tone for their day and yours!
If your baby wakes up too early, it can cut into your sleep or morning productivity. And if you have to wake your baby up because they’re sleeping too late, it means they didn’t get all the night time sleep their body needed.
I recommend that families set a baby bedtime that is 11 to 12 hours before their preferred wake up time. For example, if you want your baby to wake up at 7:00 am, try to set bedtime around 7:00 pm.
Be realistic though! Your baby isn’t likely to sleep in until 9 am everyday even with a later bedtime!
Night Feedings
Many 7-month-old babies have dropped night feeding and are sleeping through the night now, or are metabolically able to if they aren’t there yet! If your baby is still waking up multiple times in the middle of the night you can use a sleep training method to help them learn independent sleep. I’ve worked with several babies at this age and they all have done wonderfully!
If you’d like more samples for your 7-month-old’s schedule (and up to 4 years old!), check out my Baby Sleep Schedule Binder.
My blog is full of things to help you celebrate motherhood including baby nursery ideas, sleep schedules and sleep tips, fun printables, baby registry must-haves, and so much more.
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