Children with smaller vocabulary and poorer cognitive skills nap more often: study

Infants who nap often tend to have smaller vocabularies and poorer cognitive skills, new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) has found. 

 

Children, researchers caution, are all individuals, and should be allowed to nap as frequently and for as long as they need. 

 

That being said, their new work has revealed that some children are more efficient at consolidating information during sleep, so they nap less frequently, while others, usually those with fewer words and poorer cognitive skills, need to nap more frequently.

 

“There is a lot of parental anxiety around sleep. Parents worry that their kids don’t nap as much as expected for their age – or nap too frequently and for too long,” said lead researcher Dr Teodora Gliga.

 

“But our research shows that how frequently a child naps reflects their individual cognitive need. Some are more efficient at consolidating information during sleep, so they nap less frequently. Children with smaller vocabularies or a lower score in a measure of executive function, nap more frequently.”

 

“Young children will naturally nap for as long as they need and they should be allowed to do just that,” she added.

 

To reach their findings the research team studied 463 infants aged between eight months and three years of age during lockdown in 2020.

 

Parents were surveyed about their children’s sleep patterns, their ability to focus on a task, keep information in their memory, and the number of words that they understood and could say. 

 

They also asked parents about their socio-economic status – including their postcode, income, and education – and about the amount of screen time and outdoors activities their child engaged in. 

 

“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,” Dr Gliga explained. 

 

“Because nurseries were closed, it meant less disturbance to the children’s natural sleep patterns. None of the children taking part were attending day care.”

 

“What we found is that the structure of daytime sleep is an indicator of cognitive development. Infants with more frequent but shorter naps than expected for their age had smaller vocabularies, and worse cognitive function.”

 

“We also found that this negative association between vocabulary and frequency of naps was stronger in older children,” she added. 

 

While previous studies have suggested that parents and caregivers should encourage children to take frequent naps in preschool, the new findings suggest that parents and educators should follow the lead of the children.

 

“Some children may drop naps earlier because they don’t need them anymore. Others may still need to nap past three years of age,” Dr Gliga explained. 

 

“In the UK, preschools enrolling three to five-year-olds have no provisions for napping. Caregivers should use a child’s mental age and not chronological age to ascertain a child’s sleep needs.” 

 

The study was led by UEA in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Leeds and the University of Warwick. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

 

Access the findings in full here.