Preschool naps should be preserved, even in the face of pressures to add more to the curriculum, say researchers who concluded that sleep enhances kids’ memories.
Children who took midday naps of an average of a little longer than an hour performed better on a task that day and the next day than did the kids who didn’t nap, scientists reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They also found that the non-nappers couldn’t make up the deficit with nighttime sleep.
This is important, the researchers said, in part because there had not been previous research on why napping is important, and as a result, that time was targeted in efforts to find more opportunities for learning because even young children are under pressure for academic achievement.
“With increased curriculum demands and taxpayer pressure, classroom nap opportunities are becoming devalued,” the researchers wrote. These children are in the process of growing from babies who slept off and on all day to children who sleep primarily at night.
“We offer scientific evidence that the midday naps for preschoolers support the academic goals of early education,” lead researcher Rebecca Spencer, a research psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a statement.
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