14 Month Sleep Regression: Why It Happens, How Long It Lasts, and What Helps

If your good sleeper suddenly fights the crib, wakes at night, or refuses one of their naps right around 14 months, you didn’t do anything wrong. The 14 month sleep regression is real, and for most toddlers it’s driven by one big thing happening in the background: the shift from two naps a day to one. Add a dose of separation anxiety and a molar or two, and you get a few rough weeks. The good news is that this is a schedule problem far more than a sleep problem, which means it’s fixable.

Before we go further, the question you came here to answer:

What is the 14 month sleep regression?

The 14 month sleep regression is a stretch of disrupted sleep, usually somewhere between about 13 and 15 months, when a toddler who had settled into a predictable rhythm suddenly starts resisting naps, waking at night, or waking too early. Unlike the 4 month regression, which is tied to a permanent change in sleep architecture, the 14 month version is mostly about the daytime schedule. Your toddler’s sleep needs are shifting faster than their nap schedule is, and the gap shows up at night.

The single biggest driver at this age is the 2-to-1 nap transition. Around now, many toddlers begin refusing one of their two naps, taking forever to fall asleep, or waking early because their bodies simply need less daytime sleep than they used to. That transition is rarely clean, and the messy in-between weeks are what most parents are actually describing when they Google “14 month sleep regression.”

Why it happens

A few things tend to hit at once around 14 months, and they all land on sleep:

• The 2-to-1 nap transition. This is the headline. Two naps start to add up to more daytime sleep than your toddler needs, which steals from nighttime pressure. The result is a toddler who fights the second nap, or naps fine but wakes at 5am. The transition itself often takes several weeks to fully settle.¹
• Separation anxiety resurges. Around 14 months, toddlers understand more about coming and going, and bedtime can become a flashpoint for not wanting you to leave. This is normal social and emotional development, not manipulation.
• Teething, often molars. First molars commonly push through in the second year and can be genuinely uncomfortable, adding night wakings on top of everything else.
• Big motor and language leaps. Many toddlers are walking or close to it, and language is taking off. The brain does a lot of that consolidation overnight, which can mean lighter, more broken sleep for a while.

None of these are problems to fix so much as phases to ride out. The nap transition is the one you can actively steer, which is why most of the useful moves below are about the daytime schedule.

Why the messy in-between weeks show up at night

Signs your toddler is in the 14 month sleep regression

The signs that line up most consistently at this age are:

• One of the two naps starts getting refused, cut short, or fought hard, especially the afternoon one.
• Bedtime, which used to be smooth, turns into a negotiation with lots of crying or standing at the crib rail.
• Night wakings return in a toddler who had been sleeping through.
• Early morning wakings appear, often before 6am.
• Clinginess and tears at drop-off and at bedtime ramp up (the separation piece).
• Fussiness and meltdowns increase in the late afternoon, a classic overtired-toddler tell.

You don’t need all of them. A refused nap plus new night wakings, showing up together around 14 months, is usually the whole story.

What our data shows

Frequent night waking is far more common at this age than most exhausted parents realize. In our State of Baby Sleep survey of 5,002 parents, 53.5% of those with a 13 to 18 month old still reported three or more wakings a night. That number is down from its 7 to 9 month peak of 67.3%, but it means roughly half of toddlers this age are still waking multiple times. If your 14 month old is waking, you are squarely in the majority.

A pattern worth naming: the toddlers who moved through this window fastest were the ones whose parents treated it as a nap-schedule problem first, before touching anything at night. When the daytime sleep is right for a toddler’s age, night sleep usually follows. When parents jump straight to night interventions while the nap schedule is still off, the wakings tend to persist.

“At 14 months, the single most useful question isn’t ‘how do I get them to stop waking?’ It’s ‘is the nap schedule still right?’ Nine times out of ten, fixing the day fixes the night.”

If you’d rather see where your toddler sits and get a schedule tuned to their age instead of a generic one, that’s what the Betteroo quiz was built for.

What actually helps

Five moves do more, during this window, than any single sleep program. Most of them are about the daytime schedule, because at 14 months that’s where the leverage is.

1. Treat the nap transition, not just the nights.

The mistake most parents make is dropping to one nap the first time the second nap gets refused. One bad nap day is not a transition. Hold two naps as long as your toddler will genuinely take them, and only move to one nap when they consistently fight or skip the second nap for one to two weeks. When you do transition, push the single nap toward midday and expect a week or two of adjustment. For the step-by-step version, see the 2-to-1 nap transition guide.

Typical wake windows and nap counts through the transition. The 13 to 15 month row is the one to watch this month.

Age	Wake window	Naps	Total sleep
12 months	3 to 4 hours	2	12 to 14 hours
13 to 15 months  ⭐	3.5 to 4.5 hours (2-nap) / 5 to 6 hours (1-nap)	2 moving to 1	12 to 14 hours
16 to 18 months	5 to 6 hours	1	11 to 14 hours

Ranges are typical; healthy toddlers vary. See the 14 month old sleep schedule for a full sample day.

2. Use an early bedtime as a bridge.

On days when a nap is short or skipped, move bedtime 30 to 60 minutes earlier. This sounds backward, but an overtired toddler wakes more at night and earlier in the morning. An early bedtime is the single most reliable tool for smoothing out the bumpy transition weeks, and it costs you nothing to try tonight.

3. Keep bedtime short, consistent, and connection-heavy.

Separation anxiety is real at 14 months, and bedtime is where it shows up. A predictable 20 to 30 minute routine, with a few minutes of undivided attention baked in, helps a clingy toddler feel secure enough to let you leave. Resist the urge to stretch the routine longer each night to soothe the tears, which quietly teaches your toddler that protesting keeps you in the room.

4. Respond to night wakings the same way every time.

Whatever you decide to do when your toddler wakes, whether that’s a brief check, a quiet reassurance, or a longer settle, pick one calm response and use it every night for at least a week. Consistency matters far more than which approach you pick. Switching tactics out of exhaustion teaches a toddler that it’s worth holding out to see what they get tonight.

5. Take shifts so one adult sleeps.

If there are two adults in the house, split the night so each of you gets a protected block of real sleep. A rested parent handles a toddler’s rough week with far more patience than a depleted one, and the sleep loss compounds across weeks if one person absorbs all of it. This isn’t indulgent, it’s how you make it through the regression without falling apart.

What doesn’t help (and what to skip this week)

Equal time for the things that won’t move the needle and might make it worse:

• Dropping to one nap the first hard day. This is the most common way parents accidentally extend the regression. A single skipped nap is not a transition. Hold two naps until the pattern is clearly consistent over one to two weeks.
• Pushing bedtime later to “tire them out.” A later bedtime almost always backfires at this age, producing an overtired toddler who wakes more, not less.
• Changing five things at once. If you drop a nap, move bedtime, swap the comfort object, and start a new night approach in the same week, you’ll never know what helped. Change one variable at a time.
• Adding a new prop you’re not willing to keep. Bringing your toddler into your bed or introducing long overnight rocking to survive week one is fine as a choice, but only if you’re prepared to keep it going for a while. Adding it in desperation and yanking it away later usually creates a second, harder disruption.

When it’s NOT just the regression

The 14 month sleep regression is common, but it isn’t the only thing that can disrupt a toddler’s sleep. Talk to your pediatrician, not your sleep app, if any of the following are happening:

• Persistent breathing changes during sleep, such as snoring with pauses, unusually heavy breathing, or mouth breathing that won’t resolve. AAP guidance treats this as a flag worth raising.²
• Total daily sleep dramatically below the typical range (roughly 11 to 14 hours including naps at this age) across multiple weeks, not just a few bad nights.³
• Missed developmental milestones alongside the sleep change.
• Signs of ear pain or illness, such as tugging at ears, fever, or crying that spikes when lying flat.
• A sudden change in alertness, mood, tone, or temperature.

Outside of those, what you’re seeing is almost certainly the regression. Draining, but typical.

A note on sleep training during the regression

At 14 months, structured behavioral sleep approaches are well within the age range the research supports, so if you’ve previously trained and things have slipped, a consistent reset is reasonable.⁴ The catch is timing: starting from scratch in the thick of a nap transition, while the daytime schedule is still off, tends to spin its wheels. Fix the nap schedule first, then decide whether a formal approach is needed. Often the schedule fix alone resolves the nights.

If the disruption drags on well past six weeks, or a similar wave hits again a month later, that may be the 15 month sleep regression rather than a continuation of this one. The drivers overlap, and the same schedule-first playbook applies.

Frequently asked questions

Key takeaway

The 14 month sleep regression is mostly the 2-to-1 nap transition wearing a scary name, with separation anxiety and teething along for the ride. It isn’t a sign that your toddler’s sleep is broken, and it isn’t permanent. Hold two naps until your toddler is genuinely ready for one, use an early bedtime to bridge the rough days, keep bedtime consistent and connected, respond the same way each night, and take shifts so you can function. Fix the day, and the night usually follows.

Want hands-on help near you? Betteroo maintains verified directories of baby sleep consultants in 11 US cities, every listing checked monthly against the consultant’s own site and certifying program, with transparent pricing. Browse sleep consultants by city or see what a sleep consultant costs.