SLATE: At times I have thought that if babies didn’t nap, humans would not be long for this world. Daytime sleep is, of course, good for infants and all—it helps their brains develop, among other things—but it’s really essential for parents, as it gives us those (albeit way too short) refueling breaks we need so we can tackle the rest of the day’s stinky diapers, screechy tantrums, and whiny demands. Would more kids be left on church doorsteps if naps didn’t exist? Probably.
But once kids hit a certain age—somewhere between 2 and 4, in my experience—naps undergo a nasty Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. Instead of being something we look forward to all morning, they become a source of angst. Our kids fight us. We fight back. We spend the afternoon driving around in circles just so they pass out and drool on themselves for 20 minutes, because if they don’t, we know: The rest of the day will be hell. The cruelest part is that when they do nap, when we have actually won, we still end up losing, because then our blasted kids refuse to fall asleep again until 10 p.m. Yet even when naps become this much of a nightmare, most parents still fight to the death for them. We fear the monsters that we and our napless kids will become; we believe with every fiber of our spent beings that naps are important, dammit.
But new research suggests we’re wrong. Some kids older than 2 may actually be better off without naps—in fact, their brains may benefit from not having them. “Just like food is only good if you are hungry,” explains Karen Thorpe, a developmental psychologist at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, “naps are only good if they are needed.” Thorpe and her colleagues Simon Smith and Sally Staton explained that they came to this conclusion after analyzing 26 studies on napping in a systematic review they published in February… (more)
