Babies who nap more frequently might have a smaller vocabulary and lower cognitive skills, according to a new study published in the medical journal JCPP Advances.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia studied 463 babies who were between eight-months-old and three-years-old. Parents of the children were asked about their kids' sleep patterns, ability to focus on a task, ability to remember information, and about the number of words that their child understood and could say.
"There is a lot of parental anxiety around sleep," Teodora Gliga, a professor of psychology at the University of East Anglia and lead researcher on the paper told ScienceDaily.com. "Parents worry that their kids don't nap as much as expected for their age — or nap too frequently and for too long. But our research shows that how frequently a child naps reflects their individual cognitive need."
Some babies are more efficient at consolidating information while they sleep, therefore need to sleep less.
This doesn't mean you should limit how much your child naps in hopes of widening their vocabulary, she says. Let your child nap as much as they need.
'Children have different sleep needs'
Researchers studied the babies during 2020, when most of the world was required to quarantine.
None of the babies were in any sort of childcare.
"Lockdown gave us an opportunity to study children's intrinsic sleep needs because when children are in childcare, they rarely nap as much as they need to," Gliga said.
The team's findings counter prior research.
"Previous work suggested that caregivers should encourage frequent naps, in preschool children," she said. "Our findings suggest that children have different sleep needs."
Some kids might stop napping earlier because sleep isn't useful for their development, while others might nap past the age of three.
"Young children will naturally nap for as long as they need and they should be allowed to do just that," Gliga said.
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