A Healthy Child Needs a Healthy Brain, A Healthy Brain Needs Healthy Sleep

Introduction: There are five main elements of healthy sleep for children:

1. Sleep duration: night and day (Blog Post 6).
2. Sleep consolidation (Blog Post 11).
3. Sleep schedule, timing of sleep, bedtime (Blog Post 8) (Parents’ Reports 2).
4. Sleep regularity (Blog Post 12).
5. Naps (Blog Posts 53–56) (Parents Reports 5)

1. Nap Duration

A. Long naps are good: Children have more positive mood and persistence. Children are better able to accept and adjust to new routines; your child is more adaptable (Blog Posts 46–48 and 182).

B. Long naps incorrectly appear to be bad: Short or fragmented night sleep causes long naps. These children may have neurobehavioral problems. The neurobehavioral problems are incorrectly associated with long naps instead of impaired night sleep. Long naps do not fully compensate for short night sleep duration. Impaired night sleep harms the child (Blog Posts 113 and 182).

2. Nap Frequency

Habitual nappers versus non-habitual nappers: Among children 3–6 years old, three groups of children were examined based on nap habituality (Blog Post 55):

1. Frequent nappers (napped more than 70 percent of available days).
2. Sometime nappers (napped 15 to 70 percent of available days).
3. Rarely nappers (napped less than 15 percent of available days).

Objective measures of sleep showed that on an experimental nap promotion day (children were encouraged to nap between 1:00 and 3:00 P.M. by teachers’ verbal encouragement: “Today is nap day, try to sleep”), total nap sleep time increased for all three groups. Napping more did not reduce night sleep.

3. Culture Effects Napping

A. Comparing Cultures:

Comparing children from predominately Caucasian, Asian, and Middle East countries, Professor Jodi Mindell showed a trend towards later bedtimes, more frequent and longer night wakings, less nighttime and less daytime sleep durations, and more sleep problems in Middle East countries. Asian countries had late bedtimes perhaps attributed to placing a high value on academic accomplishment with studying late at night. Separate reports describe Spain, Italy, and South America as having late bedtimes and shorter sleep durations perhaps attributed to placing a high value on having children participate in the family evening life, including a late dinner. In some cultures, Grandparents or nannies are highly involved in child-care including naps and sleeping with the baby at night in a separate room is common. Affordability of nannies and government paid maternity leave varies greatly among different countries (Blog Post 14).

B. Dutch study (Blog Post 101):

For two matched groups of 8-month-old infants, one in the Netherlands and one in the U.S.A.: “The Dutch infants averaged 13.7 hours of total sleep per 24 hours, 1.7 hours more than the U.S. infants; this difference was mostly due to daytime sleep.” • Dutch parents were influenced by strong culturally shared beliefs that emphasized “the three R’s”: ‘rust’ (rest); ‘regelmaat’ (regularity), and ‘reinheid’ (cleanliness). Sleep is a major part of the notion of ‘rust’ (rest). The theme is Restful Regularity. • American parents were influenced by strong culturally shared beliefs that emphasized ‘stimulation’ because they believe that stimulation boosts baby’s brain power and advances cognitive development. The theme is Developmental Stimulation.

C. China study (Blog Post 182):

In China, post-lunch napping is a common practice for school age children. About 1,000 children in 6th grade who were about 12.5 years-old, took naps per week as follows:



Never	0-2	3-4	5-7
12%	19%	29%	40%



“In China, napping is a common practice and is promoted as a way to facilitate children’s broadening scope of awareness and building the individual’s resources. Indeed, the extended lunch periods routinely provided by many educational institutions and government agencies factor in napping time. These positive traditions or cultural expectations may facilitate the constructive effects of napping, whereas in Western countries napping in older children is negatively perceived, which may dampen the perceived benefits of napping and outcomes.” • When the bedtime is too late, naps help: “Overall, napping was significantly associated with higher happiness, grit, and self-control, reduced internalizing behavior problem, higher verbal IQs and better academic achievement. In addition, we found that optimal academic achievement and positive psychology was associated with longer naps (31-60 minutes and greater than 60 minutes) and most frequent (5-7 times per week).”

(To be continued)