13-month-old not sleeping through the night: a 7-night plan

Thirteen months has its own night-waking profile. Three things tend to land in the same few weeks.

• The 2-to-1 nap switch usually starts somewhere between 12 and 15 months
• First molars arrive around 12 months (NHS)
• Walking gets rehearsed at 1 a.m., standing up and not knowing how to sit back down
• 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours is the recommended total at 1 to 2 years, naps included (AASM)
• Give one change 5 to 7 nights before judging it. That timeline is our own working rule, not a guideline number

🌙 Map the day first: enter your child's age in the sleep schedule calculator to see where naps and bedtime land.

Quick reference: night waking at 13 months

Why 13 months is not just "toddler night waking"

Most night-waking advice is written for either a 6-month-old or a 2-year-old, and 13 months sits in the gap between them. If your child is younger, the six-month pattern is a different problem with a different fix: see waking every two hours at six months. If the waking is still here past the second birthday, the picture shifts again toward bedtime resistance and fears, covered in waking multiple times a night at two.

What makes 13 months distinct is that the daytime structure is actively changing underneath the night. At six months the nap schedule is unstable but the child cannot yet stand, walk, or protest a bedtime with any real strategy. At two the schedule has been one nap for a year. At 13 months a child is halfway out of the two-nap day, halfway into walking, and cutting the biggest teeth they have had so far.

So the question is rarely "what sleep method should we use". It is closer to "which of the three things happening this month is actually costing us the night".

The 2-to-1 nap switch is usually the main driver

This is the piece that most often gets mistaken for a regression. Somewhere after the first birthday the morning nap starts eating into the afternoon one. The afternoon nap slides later, bedtime slides later, and the night fragments.

The messy part is that the switch is not a single day. For weeks the child needs two naps on some days and one on others, and the wrong guess on a given day shows up at 2 a.m. rather than at the nap.

Signs the switch is actually underway:

• the morning nap gets longer while the afternoon nap shrinks to 20 or 30 minutes, or disappears
• the second nap starts refusing to happen before 4 p.m. and there is no room for it
• bedtime keeps drifting past the usual window because the second nap ended late
• early-morning waking appears, then the morning nap starts absurdly early, and the loop tightens

A practical middle path during the switch: push the morning nap 15 minutes later every few days rather than dropping it outright, and keep a short afternoon nap available on the days the morning one runs long. How to switch from 2 naps to 1 walks the full transition.

One family in the beta group spent three weeks convinced bedtime was broken. It was a 9:40 a.m. nap that had crept forward twenty minutes at a time since Christmas.

Walking is being practised in the cot

The CDC lists taking a few steps alone as something most children do by 15 months (CDC). Thirteen months sits right inside the rehearsal window, and rehearsal does not stop at bedtime.

What this looks like at night: the child wakes between sleep cycles the way everyone does, finds themselves standing at the cot rail, and cannot work out the sitting-down half of the skill yet. That is not distress. It is an incomplete motor loop, and it resolves once sitting down becomes automatic.

Two things help. Practise sitting down from standing during the day, on the floor, as a game. And when it happens at night, lay the child down once, calmly, without conversation or lights, then leave. Repeating the lie-down ten times turns it into a game with better rewards than sleep.

Language does the same thing. A child working on their first handful of words will sometimes narrate at 3 a.m. Nothing to fix there.

Teeth: what the calendar actually says at 13 months

The NHS tooth timeline puts first molars at around 12 months, canines at around 18 months, and second molars at around 24 months (NHS).

That matters because "it's the molars" is often said about a 13-month-old and then used to explain six weeks of bad nights. First molars are broad and they do disturb sleep, but a single tooth surfacing tends to disturb a short stretch of nights, not a month. Our working rule is 2 to 5 rough nights around a tooth breaking through, then improvement.

If the pattern has run longer than that with no better nights in between, teeth are probably a passenger rather than the driver. Teething signs and what actually helps covers the symptoms worth taking seriously.

Wake windows and nap math at 13 months

Before changing anything at night, check the arithmetic of the day. These are our working ranges, drawn from what a 13-month schedule usually has to fit, not published guideline numbers.

1. Two-nap day: roughly 3.5 to 4.5 hours awake before nap one, a similar stretch before nap two, then about 3.5 to 4 hours to bedtime.
2. One-nap day: roughly 5 hours awake before the nap, then 4 to 5.5 hours to bedtime.
3. Total day sleep: past about 3 hours of napping, night sleep at this age often starts giving way. Under about 1.5 hours, bedtime usually turns into a fight.
4. Bedtime window: keep it inside 30 minutes, and let a short nap day pull bedtime earlier rather than later.
5. Room: dark, cool, no screens. We aim for 18 to 20 °C as a rule of thumb; a warm room costs more nights than most parents expect.

The chart in wake windows by age sets these against the months either side, which is useful when you are trying to work out whether you are early or late into the switch.

A 7-night plan, boring on purpose

The most common mistake at this age is changing something every night, which makes it impossible to learn what worked. Pick the anchors, hold them, then read the week.

Nights 1 and 2: set the anchors

• One wake-up time, inside a 30-minute band, including after a terrible night. This is the lever that quietly fixes the rest.
• Protect nap one from drifting earlier. An early first nap is how the whole day collapses forward.
• One bedtime window, not "whenever they seem tired". Tired signals at 13 months are unreliable; children hide the window by getting livelier.

Nights 3 to 5: one night response, repeated

Choose a single response and use it every time, all three nights.

• feeding at night: the same brief, quiet feed each time, or a planned reduction you can sustain
• standing in the cot: lay them down once, no talking, then step out
• a dummy or comforter: replace it once, then stop

Do not add a new sleep gadget mid-week. Toddlers read inconsistency as uncertainty, and they are right.

Nights 6 and 7: read the trend

• count the average wakes across seven nights, not the worst one
• check whether nap one held its time and whether bedtime stayed in the window
• if the average is moving down at all, hold everything for another week before touching it

Decision logic: hold the plan or change it

Sometimes the honest answer is that it was teething and overtiredness and a cold, all at once, and no single lever explains it.

Common mistakes that keep 13-month night waking going

• Dropping to one nap in a single day. At 13 months most children still need two on some days. A hard cut buys a week of overtired nights.
• Pushing bedtime later to "tire them out". Overtired sleep fragments. It is usually the opposite fix.
• Starting the day at 5 a.m. to stop the crying. A week of that and 5 a.m. becomes the new wake-up time.
• Changing five things at once. You get a result you cannot repeat.
• Reading one bad night as failure. Sleep at this age moves in weekly averages.
• Blaming teeth for everything. See the calendar above.

If short naps are the sticking point, the patterns in baby fights the last nap every day usually apply at 13 months too.

When to call the pediatrician

Contact your pediatrician if the night waking comes with any of the following.

• breathing trouble in sleep: snoring with pauses, or loud laboured breathing
• pain that comfort does not touch, or inconsolable distress
• fever that keeps returning, or a suspected ear infection (ear pulling, fluid, fever)
• poor drinking, fewer wet nappies, or weight falling off its curve
• a loss of skills the child previously had
• worry that keeps growing rather than settling

Bring a week of dated notes. Pediatricians can do a lot more with "seven nights, four wakes on average, worst at 1 a.m., naps 45 and 20 minutes" than with "he's not sleeping".

Thirteen months sits right between the 12-month wobble and the 2-to-1 nap switch, which is why it can feel like two problems at once. The baby sleep guide 0–2 years shows where this month sits in the bigger sequence.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal for a 13-month-old to still wake at night?
Yes. Plenty of healthy 13-month-olds wake at least once, and total sleep matters more than unbroken sleep. The AASM recommendation for 1 to 2 year olds is 11 to 14 hours per 24 hours including naps, and a child can hit that with wakes in the middle. What matters is the direction of travel: one bad night is noise, two weeks of worsening is a signal.

Is this the 12-month sleep regression?
The label is informal, and at 13 months it usually describes the nap transition rather than a separate event. Signs of the 12-month sleep regression lists what tends to show up. If the nap schedule is the thing moving, fix the schedule and the nights usually follow.

Could separation anxiety be behind it at 13 months?
It can be, though the timing is less predictable than people expect. The AAP notes that most babies develop stronger separation anxiety around 9 months, while many toddlers skip that phase and start at 15 or 18 months instead (AAP). Thirteen months can sit between the two waves. Separation anxiety in babies covers what helps.

Should we night wean at 13 months?
That is a conversation with your pediatrician, not a rule. Some families keep one feed well past this age; others move the calories into the day. If you change night feeding, pick an approach you can repeat for at least seven nights, because a half-finished change teaches nothing.

My 13-month-old wakes at 5 a.m. Is that night waking?
If they are up for the day, that is early waking, and it has its own logic. The usual levers are a later first nap and a slightly earlier bedtime, plus keeping the room dark past 6 a.m. See waking too early after a good night.

Will sleep training fix it?
Sometimes, and sometimes it is the wrong tool. Most "sleep training didn't work" stories at 13 months are nap timing problems wearing a costume: no method survives a day that is 40 minutes out of shape. If you are weighing it up, what the science says about sleep training safety is the place to start.

How long does the 2-to-1 nap transition take?
Usually several weeks rather than several days, and it rarely runs in a straight line. Expect days that clearly need two naps mixed in with days that clearly need one, for a while.

How KidyGrow helps

At 13 months the hard part is not choosing a plan. It is remembering, on night four, what nights one to three actually looked like.

That is the job KidyGrow takes. You log naps, bedtime, wakes, mood, teeth, illness, and the app holds the thread across the week while you are too tired to. Early on, the Daily Brief says fairly plain things: two naps today, bedtime around this time. After a week or so it gets specific, because it has something to compare against. It might surface that the three worst nights all followed a first nap that started before 9 a.m., or that the second nap has quietly vanished on four of the last six days, which is the nap switch announcing itself before you have named it.

The Tonight plan then works off your child's last week rather than an age chart. Calibration takes 3 to 5 days of regular logging, and some weeks it finds nothing useful because the week was illness and travel and chaos. That happens.

If you are mid nap switch, using KidyGrow through the 2-to-1 transition is the walkthrough. The change most parents notice is smaller than it sounds: the morning question stops being "what on earth happened this week" and becomes "this is what the week was, now I can pick one thing".

_This content is educational and does not replace professional sleep or medical advice. If sleep is significantly affecting your family, talk to your pediatrician._

Sources

1. American Academy of Sleep Medicine - Child sleep duration health advisory (accessed 2026).
2. AAP HealthyChildren - Healthy Sleep Habits: How Many Hours Does Your Child Need? (accessed 2026).
3. NHS - Baby teething symptoms and tooth timeline (accessed 2026).
4. CDC Learn the Signs. Act Early. - Milestones by 15 months (accessed 2026).
5. AAP HealthyChildren - Soothing Your Child's Separation Anxiety (accessed 2026).
6. NHS - Helping your baby to sleep (accessed 2026).