14 DAY TRIAL // That's why many get rid of their kids for a moment: they put them to take a nap in the afternoon. But this seems not to be beneficial for the children, as some recent researches have found that daytime napping in the case of young children can be connected to poorer sleep and mental performance compared to their counterparts that only sleep at night. But the researchers cannot say if the nap is the cause or the result of the impaired night sleep.
A team led by John Harsh at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg interrogated the parents of 738 children aged 2 to 12 about their children's sleeping habits. Children taking long afternoon naps went to bed at night on average 39 minutes later and fell asleep later at the weekend than those who did not take naps. This effect was even more severe in older children (more than 25 % of those aged 10 to 12 still took afternoon naps).
The problem resulted during the week, when kids had to wake up early to go to school or schedule their program according to their parents' programs, as they slept less during the night than other children did. "Napping children not only had a difficult time getting to bed, they had a harder time falling asleep, and they had a harder time getting up in the morning," said co-author Alyssa Cairns.
The same results came from a research made by Kazuhiko Fukuda of Fukushima University in Japan. Fukuda assessed the children's behavior comparing those who attended all-day pre-schools in Japan, where 90-minute naps are compulsory, with children of similar ages who napped only when they felt so. Besides going to bed on average 30 minutes later, the children taking obligatory naps were more likely to be anxious in the morning and refuse to go to school. "These behaviors lasted even after the children moved on to elementary school and stopped napping, perhaps because of the lasting influence of napping on their sleep and wake cycles," believes Fukuda. "Napping may also affect mental performance," according to Joe McNamara of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
He assessed how well 27 kindergarteners could solve puzzles involving planning and organizational abilities. Those with a program which included longer naps finished fewer puzzles successfully; the later they went to bed, the worse they acted. "These findings pose a chicken and egg problem. It could be that children are getting less sleep at night because they're napping, or they could be napping because they're getting less sleep at night," said Harsh. Even if napping and non-napping children slept overall the same time amount daily, "napping is not a substitute for night-time sleep", said McNamara.
In any case, night sleep is proven to be a far more complicated brain process than resting ...