Episode 17
Managing Sleep in Childcare: How to Balance Naps, Nighttime Routines, and Developmental Needs
In this episode, Zoe dives into the crucial topic of sleep in early childhood education, exploring how sleep routines in childcare settings can impact young children’s development. Sleep can often be a point of concern for parents, especially when balancing home routines with the care environment. Zoe breaks down how Adeona approaches sleep and rest times, ensuring children get the rest they need while respecting their natural rhythms and individual needs.
This episode covers recommended sleep durations for different age groups, the role of naps in brain development, and how sleep impacts memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and motor skills. Zoe also discusses strategies for adjusting sleep schedules in collaboration with educators to ensure smooth transitions between daytime naps and nighttime sleep.
If you’ve ever wondered how childcare services manage sleep or how you can support healthy sleep habits at home, this episode is packed with valuable insights. Tune in to learn more about why rest is essential and how to work with your child’s educators to create a consistent, balanced sleep routine.
This episode covers:
- Sleep routines in childcare vs. home
- Recommended sleep durations for children by age
- The importance of naps for children’s brain development
- Sleeping too much at daycare / not sleeping enough at daycare
- The challenges of sleeping in a childcare setting – why some children struggle to nap
- How childcare centers respect children’s sleep needs
- Adjusting children’s sleep schedules with educators
- Balancing naps with nighttime sleep
- Encouraging healthy sleep habits
Helpful Links
Thank You
We’d love to hear from you! If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions about anything we discussed in this episode, please feel free to reach out – zoe@adeona.com.au.
Our Early Childhood Education Centres
Coorparoo | Mitchelton | Noosaville | Mackay
Podcast Transcription
Zoe (00:11):
Hello and welcome to Adeona Family Podcast. My name is Zoe, and today we’re going to be covering the very interesting topic of sleep, and in particular, sleep in care. Before I go too far into our podcast today, I’d like to say and acknowledge that I am coming to you from Yuggera and Turrbal country today, and we are so honored to be on this land and every day as a community, we try our very best to make sure we are respecting and looking after this space. So sleep in childcare and sleep in young children is quite often a topic we speak with families a fair bit about. It is sometimes a bit of a contentious issue because we have families trying to do something at home, and then the care environment is a very different space to sleep in. And so we really try to work with families to make a plan that’s going to suit both. But today, what I really wanted to be able to do was to give you a bit of information about sleep. What it looks like and should look like in early childhood, and expectations for us at Care, what things we will do if we’re going to work with you to make a plan for sleep for your child. And also a bit of brain development around the importance of naps for children. So in a care environment, we generally will work with a child and we will provide sleep space for them whenever they need sleep.
Zoe (01:42):
It looks different in every age group. So obviously in our nursery we have children who sometimes are arriving very early in the morning and it’s actually time for them to have a nap or a sleep. And so we accommodate that. Then through to say, for example, our kindergarten aged children who by that age most of them have dropped their sleep. What we do in that space is we provide them with some downtime during the day, and then if there are children who want to sleep, we accommodate that specifically, and we do a lot of work with those children around, recognising what their body needs and when they need to have a rest. It’s a very important skill to have and especially, you know, us adults, I think forget about that sometimes and we forget to listen to what our body is actually telling us to do, and we could probably benefit from a nap sometimes ourselves. So let’s have a little talk about sleep and development for children. And this information is available in Queensland Health. The recommended sleep or the average or normal sleep time for children at different ages are. So for under 12 months old we’re looking at 12 to 16 hours per day, including naps. So they might have their long sleep overnight and then have naps during the day. Then for our 1 to 2 year olds, we’re looking at between 11 and 14 hours of sleep a day, including naps.
Zoe (03:05):
So once again, it might be those longer periods overnight and then smaller naps during the day, 1 or 2 and then hour 3 to 5 year olds, it’s 10 to 13 hours of sleep. And that once again can include naps. Mostly what research says is that from the age of three, children will start to drop daytime naps, so they might start shifting from 2 to 1, or their daytime naps might start to become less. It really depends on the child, but generally most children have dropped all daytime naps by the time they are five, unless you will find that older children will have naps. But it generally means that there’s something happening for them. They’ve had a late night. It’s been a busy day, it’s been a busy few weeks and they’re not feeling quite as well as normal unless it is something that’s part that’s part of your normal sleep routine. And we’ll talk a little bit more about sleep routines in a minute, because they are very important and it’s quite important for them to be consistent. Now, in a care environment, obviously it’s a bit of a strange situation for children, especially if they’re just entering into care for the first time. It’s not that, they’re not always feeling quite as safe enough to have a sleep now, going to have a sleep is something that is tied in very deeply with trust.
Zoe (04:23):
So if you’re in a strange environment, so for example, for us as adults, if we’re on a plane, we don’t necessarily feel as safe as we do in our bed because we’re in a strange environment. We’re surrounded by a lot of other people and there’s lots of strange noises. There might be lights that we’re not used to, so we generally don’t have the best sleep in that space. Perhaps if we flew on a plane every day, eventually we would build trust in that space and feel okay to have a sleep. But we don’t generally, some of us might, but not many of us do. And so for children coming into a care situation. It takes them a little bit of time to get to that point where they can trust the environment and can relax enough to go into that sleep that they really need, and a proper sleep and deep sleep. Obviously, if they’re very tired, they will probably go into that sleep anyway. But just something to consider that it does take a little bit of time for children to adapt to the care environment and having their rest time. And of course, a lot of children, especially our two year olds and three year olds, they do have a little bit of fear of missing out, a bit of FOMO. So their naps will often be shorter because they’ll hear some noise in the room, and that will spark them to wake up and be because they want to be engaged in whatever is happening.
Zoe (05:33):
So that’s a bit of an adjustment sometimes coming into care. The other thing that is important to remember is that in care settings, we have an obligation to respect the rights of children. And so if they want to sleep, they’re allowed to sleep. And so that’s where it comes into where we will provide rest opportunities throughout the day. Should a child look like they like they need to sleep. Ask to have a sleep. That is a very important part of what we do in advocating for children’s rights. If it’s outside the normal time of when a child might sleep, we might give you a call just to say, hey, look, they’re looking really sleepy. They have asked to go to bed. Do you want us to let them have a sleep here, or would you rather come and collect them? Especially if it’s late in the afternoon? You might prefer to come and collect them and take them home and just get them through to their usual rest time at night. But that’s something that we would communicate with you. So let’s just have a little chat about now about sleep and development, because this is something that’s really important. Brains need rest and developing brains need rest. There is a ton of information out there that talks about regular sleep being important for children.
Zoe (06:43):
It is also very important for adults. But the developing brain needs times when it can enter into memory consolidation. Now this happens primarily during REM sleep. For people who are not sure what REM sleep is. Rem sleep is the stage of rapid eye movement in the sleep cycle, and that is when we dream. Now, in early childhood, naps are extremely rich in REM sleep. So when children have breaks in their day to have a nap, it gives their time, their brain time to process what they’ve been learning or sensing or interacting with and consolidate that into memory. So it becomes a really important part of building brain capacity, building knowledge, building all of that language and learning. It is also important to have those regular breaks and naps is because the longer we are awake, the less our working memory actually works. It decreases in effectiveness over time and same with our motor skills. So if you have a little friend who has been awake since, you know, 5:00 in the in the morning and we’re getting to midday. You will see that they become more clumsy. They have less emotional regulation. They cannot focus on things as much. Sometimes they will go past kind of the the point of time where they need to sleep. And so then they will re escalate and their behaviors will become quite escalated and heightened.
Zoe (08:14):
They may even, you know, become super energetic. And that’s all because parts of their brain have switched or switched off and switched on. And so what it does is it’s like that reset. It resets. It lays down memories. It lays down information and knowledge. So having said that, I’m sure you can understand that nap times are really important. There are a ton of really intelligent people who’ve existed who, even as adults, have said that this is a very important part of their process. A lot of researchers, I think even Einstein was famous for having naps. He would research some information, have a nap, just a short nap. It but didn’t have to be long. I think he would say between 15 and 20 minutes and then wake up and his brain would be ready to piece bits of information together to come up with new ideas and new thoughts and new theories. So it’s the same with our children. They are no different. So that’s why we advocate for napping in our services. We absolutely understand that for families, naps during the day can seem to interrupt what people are doing at night. Families, you know, get home. All their afternoon routine happens. So, you know, dinner, bath time, a bit of connection time and then have the children ready to go to bed. And so sometimes what happens is that if they’re having naps during the day at the service, then the parents feel that that will be interrupting their nighttime routine with the children.
Zoe (09:38):
So what I would say is, absolutely, we will work with you in that case, because what you want to do is you want to be able to create that predictable routine. Sleeps, naps all happen regularly. And then that becomes a pattern of sleep behavior and a healthy sleep behavior. So what we find sometimes is that it takes a little while to change those sleep cycles. So we can work with you to figure out the ideal time. If your child still needs a nap. To have them go to sleep and get back up, then be ready to go to bed that night. And that’s going to be different for every child, so I won’t really go into details of that right now. Research overwhelmingly says that if a nap is timed well, it will not interrupt with your nighttime sleep. So it’s always worth considering does my child need to have a nap earlier so that they’re ready to go to bed at 7:30? And going back to those sleep times that are suggested for children. If you had considered the fact that, for example, you would like your three year old to be in bed by 730, their 12 hour sleep cycle will be 730 the next morning to get up. That still leaves you with an hour of nap time during the day, which would be within the normal spectrum.
Zoe (10:50):
I would suggest that most children probably don’t sleep 12 hours of a night, so that still gives you a couple of hours of potential nap time the next day. Considering that 3 to 5 year olds should have 13 hours of sleep, up to 13 hours of sleep a day. So naps are not our enemy. We just need to figure out best way to do those and at what time. And certainly not all children need naps. That’s also something I would point out once again, that at some point children do grow out of naps, and that’s just completely individual children at individual times. So the things that we will do at Adeona, if you want to work with us to adapt your child’s sleep and nap times, is if you want to start reducing your child’s naps, I would discuss that with your team of educators that you’re working directly with, and the first thing we will do is we will look at waking children after a sleep cycle. Now this is once again changes for every age group and every child, but we can normally kind of tell when a child’s come through a sleep cycle because they will stir a little bit. So a sleep cycle is typically between 30 minutes and an hour. The average is normally around 40 minutes. So that’s typically when we would have a look and see if we can wake your child easily at that point.
Zoe (12:04):
Because if we can’t, that means they’re still in that sleep cycle. If we do wake them and then they fall back asleep again, then it probably means they need a little bit more sleep. Normally, if you catch a child at the end of their sleep cycle, they will wake up easily if they’ve had enough sleep. So that’s the first thing we will do. And that’s our recommendation is, rather than completely dropping a nap, we start by reducing sleep cycles to one sleep cycle. If we can. And then eventually we work towards letting children have no sleep at all. They tend to do that naturally themselves anyway, and we find that once a child is starting to grow out of that phase of needing a nap, then they are alert, Functional and happy to play all day without being tired, and that interrupting their interactions with their peers or the skills that they’re trying to learn. So in general, that’s basically some information on sleep for you. Obviously, if you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out to the directors at your centers. Or you can also just chat directly to the team that you’re working with. Sleep is incredibly important, and we need to instill healthy sleeping patterns in children, and that’s certainly what we work towards doing, and we always work towards doing that with you. Thank you for listening and have a great day.