The average person will spend almost 3000 hours a year sleeping. For children, that number will be closer to 4000. That’s a lot of time spent in slumberland.
We all know sleep is important for replenishing our physical energy, but that’s not all: During sleep, our brains are active and busy processing the things that we learned through the day.
This is especially true for children. According to this 2013 study, while people sleep, their brains reinforce the knowledge they learned throughout the day, and children’s brains do it more efficiently than adults’ brains do. In other words: Children learn so much every day, but without sleep, their brains wouldn’t absorb their learning as well. Growing brains are truly amazing!
And this is far from the only study that demonstrates the importance of sleep on learning. For instance, this 2016 study showed that sleep helps children with word retention and generalization.
Parents often wonder how much kids should sleep. The National Sleep Foundation has outlined recommendations in this article. How does your child’s slumber compare? If you think you need to improve sleep routines, there are many articles with tips and suggestions online.
We know that figuring out the best sleep routines for your family—along with the other day-to-day tasks of parenting—is challenging enough, and that’s why we’re here to help support your child’s learning to ensure your child’s brain has lots of knowledge to process from the day! Find a tutor near you today.