The effects of sleep on toddlers' memory
The importance of sleep to children’s learning, memory, and development
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Sleep Medicine in Sep 2025 examines the effects of nap quality, duration, and timing, as well as night's sleep, on memory consolidation, learning, and development in early childhood.
While we understand that sleep is an integral part of life (we spend a third of our adult life in sleep), for little ones, sleep is even more crucial.
How sleep Impacts on children’s memory and development
Research highlights:
1. ”Findings point to a critical role of naps in memory, learning and socio-emotional development”.
2. “From infancy, sleep enhances memory, highlighting the developmental value of naps”.
3. “Naps benefit memory in preschoolers and may play a key role in preschool learning settings”.
4. “Although habitual nappers may gain more, non-habitual nappers still benefit from naps”.
5. “Combined effects of naps and overnight sleep may enhance declarative memory consolidation”.
Naps and night’s sleep are crucial for memory and socio-emotional skills
The findings suggest that naps and night’s sleep have a significant impact on infants, babies, and toddlers' learning, concentration, and socio-emotional skill development.
Toddlers who sleep well are able to better regulate their emotions, endure irritation and discomfort, persevere with challenges, and adapt to new situations more easily.
In comparison, overtired toddlers are easily irritable, experience greater frustration with challenges, conflict, and delayed gratification. Their attention span is shorter, and tolerance and patience are that much harder to master.
All these will affect social interactions with other toddlers, caregivers, and older children (siblings, peers, playdates, etc.), and subsequently impede learning opportunities and experiences.
When toddlers are well rested, engage in novel activities, imitate sounds (language learning) and actions (learning new motor skills), they are much more successful. Their brains are geared to take in new stimuli, and aren’t quickly overwhelmed.
The role of nap routine IN fostering toddlers’ learning
Timing and duration of naps, and quality of night’s sleep had a positive impact on overall learning skills, suggesting that nap routine contributes to babies’ learning and enhances development.
Of course, having babies and toddlers on a schedule isn’t always possible. Yet the intention to set up predictable times for naps, observing their duration (by working on re-settling to ensure sufficient sleep), and awareness of sufficient night sleep, are worth striving for.
Parents' awareness of their preschoolers’ sleep needs, and prioritising naps and timely bedtime, can have a greater impact on their children's learning, emotional regulation, learning new skills, and overall learning performance.
Sleep is a biological need, just like food and water.
For that reason, understanding how much sleep your children need at different ages, and facilitating a sleep-inducing environment, adequate time for winding down to ease the transition to sleep, observing age-appropriate wake windows, and working on re-settling, is guaranteed to have a positive impact on your children’s appetite, growth, and development.
These will foster healthy sleep habits that nurture their learning and development well into the school years.
Read the full review: "Napping and memory consolidation in early childhood: A systematic review and meta-analysis".
(Maher Souabni, Mehdi J. Souabni, Atef Salem, Omar Hammouda, Achraf Ammar, Oussama Saidi, Piotr Zmijewski, Haitham Jahrami, Giovanni de Marco, Khaled Trabelsi, Tarak Driss, Napping and memory consolidation in early childhood: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Sleep Medicine, Volume 133, 2025).
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