Who doesn’t love naps?
Well, pretty much every child, I guess. I remember despising nap time, which always seemed to come right when the fun was just getting started.
So I can empathize with Mr. B and Mr. C when they complain about naps and when they attempt to whine, cajole or fuss their way out of them.
“You always feel better after your naps,” I tell them. “You need your nap so that you can be happy boys tonight,” I tell them.
And who am I kidding, Sarah and I probably need naptime even more than the boys do!
It’s a welcome break in the day’s activities to catch up on housework or other boring adult tasks, not to mention that it can give a sleep-deprived parent a chance to catch some Zs of their own.
But we’ve always thought that there’s no harm in it. Our boys do seem more refreshed in the evening when they take good naps in the afternoon, after all.
Which is why I was surprised to learn that a recent review of dozens of studies which attempt to identify the benefits of napping as documented in the pages of US News and World Report paints a very different picture of what the outcomes of naptime might really be for your child.
1. Napping Might be Depriving Your Preschooler of Sleep
Here’s the part that jumped right out at me:
“The most significant finding from our study is that there is not support in the current body of research for enforcing naps in preschool children to improve their health and well-being,” the authors said. “Napping in early childhood is often assumed to have universal benefit and this assumption hasn’t really been questioned by research before now.”
The researchers reviewed 26 studies related to napping in children aged 5 and under. They looked for information about nighttime sleep patterns. They also looked at behavior, stress, obesity, accidents and thinking skills.
Napping during the day was only consistently linked to falling asleep later, getting less sleep overall, and having poorer-quality sleep, particularly among children older than 2, the study found.”
This basically means that if you have 4 year old (or a pair of them, like us), you might be making your kids less healthy by enforcing naptime.
2. But Wait, What? I KNOW My Kid Benefit’s From Naps!
Trust me; I am in the same boat with you. Before I read this article I would have told somebody who said that my boys don’t benefit from taking a nap to just spend one dinnertime with them on a day that they haven’t.
Pediatrician Adesman concedes that the research isn’t definitive in every case:
“Adesman added, “Given that the preschool years are major transitional years from a sleep standpoint and given that children vary in every other dimension imaginable, it is likely that naps may be helpful for some preschoolers and counter-productive for others.”
I feel like I know which side of the productive/counter-productive divide my boys fall on. But then I started thinking about our readers and their specific family situations…
3. Day Care, Mother’s Day Out and Preschool
One thing that immediately occurred to me was: What if your 3 or 4 year old is subject to enforced naps at daycare, or MDO or preschool?
What if part of the problem you have been having at home around bedtime could be resolved simply by instructing their teacher or caregiver to allow them to be exempt from the daily nap?
What if the root of many a child’s “difficult” attitudes or “chaotic” sleep patterns are as a result of too much enforced napping during the day?
Despite my belief that our boys do benefit from a nap during the day, this seems like much too important of a variable to simply ignore for families dealing with issues like the ones in the examples above.
In Conclusion
If you are dealing with behavior issues, problems with sleep patterns or issues of inattention in your 3 or 4 year old, consider trying to do without the daily nap.
Some good science backs up the idea that napping during the day could be at the root of some or all of these issues.
Also, please let us know which side of this divide your kids are on!
Do you believe they benefit from naps or do you think they could be counter-productive for your children?
As a prior daycare provider, I enforced the nap in all my children up until 6 months before they started school in September. I rely on good scientific studies into pre-school brain development which indicates that children before the age of 4 benefit cognitively, socially and with improved health when the body gets at LEAST a 90 minute nap in which the brain can re-energize the body’s growth and reorganize neuron connections made. Our neuron connections benefit, much like a computer, from a defragment in order to place what is learned in it’s proper place for re-call in the brain. I have not had ONE child I napped have a single difficulty in school. I’ve had one child with Apraxia of the Speech make significant gains in re-learning speech patterns because he napped up until 6 years old (his parents kept up with the practice) and one child who is being moved to a gifted program once she reaches grade six. The benefits of naps are enormous. I understand it’s hard for parents to enforce naps, but after years of caring for other people’s children, I have found that it’s just easier to get someone else to do it. Another problem are parents who demand caregivers stop napping their children at the age of 2. They are not with their child 5 days a week. I doubt working parents understand that 2 year olds DO NOT sit quietly, keep the younger children up with their schenanigans and noise and after a 10 hour workday, the only person going to bed early is the caregiver. I have NOT met ONE 2 year old deprived of the nap who goes to bed at 7 p.m. They fall asleep in the car on the way home, don’t eat dinner and wake up at 9 p.m. after a nice long 3 hour nap.
If you think naps are not necessary, think again. Caregivers deal with puffy-eyed parents every morning at 7 a.m. who did not get a good night’s sleep because their toddler didn’t go to bed until 11:30 p.m.That break isn’t just for the parents and the caregiver. It’s very important to the child.
Rhonda, great feedback! Naps have always been really good for our boys and we will keep them going for as long as they cooperate.