Educators are always trying to add more learning time in the school day; they even tried to take away nap time from preschoolers! Scientists Rebecca Spencer and Tracey Riggins say that children who go without naps could make it harder to remember what they had learned. Rebecca Spencer and Tracey Riggins are scientists who study how thinking and memory develop in children. These two women have been studying how nap time affects a child’s way of learning. Their goal is to find out what happens when a child stops having nap time at a young age. Griffiths student Efrain Torres says “I was always tired from school and nap time was a nice break.”
In 2015, a major study found that the results of a child not having nap time is unpredictable. Spencer says “The need to nap does not just suddenly disappear at a certain age, rather it can come and go as a child develops.” As children get older they start to need less sleep. At age 4, nearly 60 percent of children still nap at least once a day. By age 5, fewer than one in three children are still daily nappers, and by age 6, only a little more than one in 10 are. Riggins and Spencer held an experiment where they asked children at six preschools to play a memory game before their normally scheduled. After some children were encouraged to fall asleep, some were not. The next morning they found that students who were kept awake during a normal nap time forgot 12 percent to 15 percent more than students who had napped. Stephanie Rico, who is a Griffiths student, said “I always felt refreshed after nap time.” Needless to say, it has been proven that children in preschools need nap time.
