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. 2023 Jul 27;3(4):e12190.
doi: 10.1002/jcv2.12190. eCollection 2023 Dec.

More frequent naps are associated with lower cognitive development in a cohort of 8-38-month-old children, during the Covid-19 pandemic

Teodora Gliga  1 , Alexandra Hendry  2 , Shannon P Kong  3 , Ben Ewing  1 , Catherine Davies  4 , Michelle McGillion  5 , Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez  3
Affiliations

More frequent naps are associated with lower cognitive development in a cohort of 8-38-month-old children, during the Covid-19 pandemic

Teodora Gliga et al. JCPP Adv. .

Abstract

Background: How often a child naps, during infancy, is believed to reflect both intrinsic factors, that is, the need of an immature brain to consolidate information soon after it is acquired, and environmental factors. Difficulty accounting for important environmental factors that interfere with a child's sleep needs (e.g., attending daycare) has clouded our ability to understand the role of intrinsic drivers of napping frequency.

Methods: Here we investigate sleep patterns in association with two measures of cognitive ability, vocabulary size, measured with the Oxford-Communicative Development Inventory (N = 298) and cognitive executive functions (EF), measured with the Early EF Questionnaire (N = 463), in a cohort of 8-38-month-olds. Importantly, because of the social distancing measures imposed during the Covid-19 Spring 2020 lockdown, in the UK, measures of sleep were taken when children did not access daycare settings.

Results: We find that children with more frequent but shorter naps than expected for their age had lower concurrent receptive vocabularies, lower cognitive EF and a slower increase in expressive vocabulary from spring to winter 2020, when age, sex, and SES were accounted for. The negative association between vocabulary and frequency of naps became stronger with age.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that the structure of daytime sleep is an indicator of cognitive development and highlight the importance of considering environmental perturbations and age when investigating developmental correlates of sleep.

Keywords: Covid‐19; executive functions; napping; pre‐school children; sleep; vocabulary.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that they have no competing or potential conflicts of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Overview of study measures by time point, indicating which measures were collected retrospectively (R) and which concurrently (C). Data collection intervals are indicated as well as the time lag between data collection waves. Key UK dates for the onset or relaxation of social distancing measures are indicated for reference.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
More frequent naps than expected for infants' age associates with lower Receptive vocabulary (top), Cognitive executive functions (EF) (middle) and with Expressive Vocabulary change rate (bottom). Y‐axes depict standardised residuals from the regression models reported in text, excluding the nap variable.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Napping once a day associates with lower vocabularies in both the younger and the older children in our cohort. Y‐axis depicts standardised residuals from the concurrent regression excluding the nap variable.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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