Why you shouldn’t worry a nap will stop your child sleeping at night
Parents may discourage naps out of concern that their child won’t then sleep at night, but research suggests that is not actually the case
By Chris Simms
15 July 2025
Naps are thought to be important for early brain development
Quintanilla/Shutterstock
A short nap during the day seems to increase the overall amount of sleep a young child gets, rather than being a serious threat to night-time slumbers.
Babies and young children typically nap during the day, a habit that has been linked to the development of early memories. This trend usually stops between the ages of about 3 and 5, but the timing varies, leaving many parents unsure as to whether their child should be snoozing during the day or not.
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In France, where children start a form of preschool at 3 years old, this presents a dilemma of whether staff should let them nap. “Although naps are widely recognised as having a positive effect on cognitive development, some parents and teachers are concerned that napping during the day might interfere with night-time sleep or reduce valuable learning time,” says Stéphanie Mazza at the University of Lyon in France.
To see if naps meaningfully disrupt night-time sleep, Mazza and her colleagues gave wrist-worn sleep trackers to 85 children aged 2 to 5 from six French preschools and measured their sleep over an average of 7.8 days.
This data, combined with sleep diaries filled in by parents, revealed that an increase in nap-time of 1 hour was linked to getting 13.6 minutes less sleep at night, on average, and pushed back the time at which the child got to sleep at night by 6.4 minutes. On days when children napped, their overall sleep time across the day increased by 45 minutes.
