The Connection between Childhood Sleep and Learning
When do children start to learn?
Sleepless nights caused by your baby can be frustrating and exhausting. Understanding how your baby learns is a great starting point to achieving healthy sleep habits.
Newborns are born ready to learn
Newborns are born ready to learn and start learning right from the moment they are born. Even prior to being born, studies have shown that a baby recognises their mother’s voice while in the womb. Once born, newborns quickly learn their mother’s scent even before they can clearly see her. Some newborns learn quickly how to feed while others take some encouragement and guidance to find the breast or bottle.
All children are capable of learning
All children, regardless of gender, race, intellectual ability, or social and economic backgrounds have the capacity to learn. Children start learning from birth and continue learning and evolving their entire life.
Why brain growth and sleep are important for learning?
Babies and toddlers learn very quickly because a child’s brain is very impressionable in early life.
Brain growth happens rapidly in infancy
The human brain is the only organ not fully developed at birth. From birth to 3 years of age, the human brain experiences tremendous growth. At birth, a newborns brain is 25% of the size of an adult brain. By 3 years of age, a toddler’s brain is 80% of a full-grown adult brain. While a baby sleeps, their brain grows and develops.
New skills and memories strengthen during sleep
Human brains are born with nearly 200 billion brain cells. At birth, a baby’s brain cells are not all connected. As a baby learns, the bridges and pathways that connect their brains cells together are strengthened. The bridges and pathways made reflect a baby’s interactions and experiences with their environment and their caregivers. When a baby sleeps, their brain consolidates their memories, what they have learnt and skills they have developed.
A baby’s brain grows while they sleep
The science of how children learn is why sleep is important for a young child’s growth and development. A simple way to think of how learning and sleep are connected is that babies experience their world while awake and the learning is strengthened as they sleep.
What are external influences on sleep and learning?
All newborns are born with a brain however their brain is built over time. The interactions a baby has with their parents and primary caregivers influence a child’s brain development and how they view the world.
Parents play a vital role in their child’s learning
Understanding how brain growth happens is very similar to understanding how a house is built. In the beginning stages of building a house there is lots of scaffolding. The purpose of scaffolding is to support the house and keep the house from falling down. Once the foundation of the house is in place the scaffolding can slowly be removed allowing the house to stand fully on its own. Parents are the builders, architects and scaffolding of the most important house they will ever build, their baby’s brain.
Early childhood interactions shape fundamental life skills
Babies learn through the experiences they have with their environment and the interactions they have with their primary caregivers. Early positive interactions shape an infant’s developing brain and form their basic social and emotional skills. While exploring, babies use all five of their senses to learn about their environment. Each experience and interaction that an infant has lays another piece to the foundation of a babies developing brain. The foundation that is laid in a child’s early years support their future development.
How a child learns to fall asleep impacts their sleep habits
Babies and toddlers are continually learning. The role parents play in the lead up to sleep time influences a child’s skill on how to fall asleep.
Babies learn from their experiences
As mentioned, babies learn from their experiences and this includes how to fall asleep. Think about the last experience your baby or toddler has before falling asleep. Are they independently lying-in bed or being held and rocked by a parent?! The last thing your baby experiences will be how they learn to fall asleep. How a child falls asleep will be exactly what they expect to happen when they briefly wake between sleep cycles. This learnt behaviour, whether dependent or independent of Mum or Dad, becomes your child’s sleep association.
Good quality sleep enhances exploring and learning
When a baby can fall asleep and put themselves back to sleep on their own, they wake feeling happy, rested, and ready to learn and explore! When a baby wakes multiple times overnight, relying on Mum or Dad to recreate how they fall asleep, everyone wakes feeling tired and irritable. When a baby wakes feeling tired, their ability to explore and learn is compromised due to exhaustion.
Sleep is a foundational necessity to learning
The purpose of sleep is to rejuvenate and help us all grow and learn! Sleep is a very active process and not only do children consolidate their learning while they sleep but their bodies and minds rest and recover so they can continue to learn and develop.
Sleep is a foundation necessity on which cognition, memories, emotional regulation, attention and learning are built.
Sleep has the following impact on childhood learning:
Sleep helps children learn and understand concepts
Sleep enhances a child’s memory
Sleep helps children deal with their emotions
Sleep helps a child cope with the ups and downs of their day
Sleep improves a child’s attention span
Approaching sleep and learning as a parent
When parents approach sleep with a calm and relaxed attitude, their little one will feel their parent’s emotions and learn that their bed is a safe and relaxing place to be. Babies learn very quickly and creating a calm and consistent experience is key in teaching your child healthy sleep habits.
Note from author
Having worked with children for the two decades as an early childhood & primary school teacher, and operator of a family daycare, I have seen first-hand how important sleep is to a child’s long-term development. Baby sleep is a journey for every family and for some families a more difficult one. Sleep is a necessity not a luxury for both parents and their children. If you are in need of support for your family to get the quality sleep they deserve please contact me here.