Within‐Family Relations in Objective Sleep Duration, Quality, and Schedule

Abstract

The current study examined within-family relations between mothers’, fathers’ and children’s objectively assessed sleep. Participants were 163 children (M age=10.45 years; SD=0.62) and their parents. For seven nights, families wore actigraphs to assess sleep duration (minutes), quality (efficiency, long wake episode, total wake minutes), and schedule (wake time). A sleep log assessed bedtime. Multilevel models indicated that children’s sleep minutes, sleep efficiency, wake minutes, and wake time were associated with fluctuations in their mothers’, but not fathers’, sleep that same night. The duration and quality of mothers’ sleep was associated with both fathers’ and children’s sleep that night; whereas, fathers’ sleep was positively associated with only mothers’ sleep. Findings highlight the importance of examining sleep within a family context.

The association of mothers' and fathers' insomnia symptoms with school-aged children's sleep assessed by parent report and in-home sleep-electroencephalography

“…Paternal insomnia and children's sleep-EEG indices were unrelated. These findings are in line with prior studies reporting associations between maternal and children's sleep patterns as measured both by sleep-EEG [8] or by actigraphy [9] but not between paternal and children's sleep patterns [9]. A possible explanation for a stronger association between maternal insomnia symptoms and children's objective sleep patterns might be that mothers in Switzerland tend to spend more time with their children than fathers [43,44].…”

“…There is compelling evidence that children's sleep is associated with parental sleep patterns [7][8][9][10], particularly with maternal sleep [8,9,[11][12][13][14]. The association was especially salient when parents' and children's sleep were measured with the same method, e.g.…”

“…The association was especially salient when parents' and children's sleep were measured with the same method, e.g. when both parental and children's sleep were reported by the parents [14] or measured with actigraphy [9] or sleepelectroencephalography (EEG) [8]. However, to date no study examined the association between parental insomnia symptoms and children's sleep measured by polysomnography, the gold-standard of sleep assessment.…”

Reciprocal Relations Between Parental Problem Drinking and Children's Sleep: The Role of Socioeconomic Adversity

“…Such child outcomes might contribute to a stressful home and promote risky coping methods among parents, including PD (Swendsen et al, 2000). In addition, children's long wake episodes often forecast mothers' night wakings (Kouros & El-Sheikh, 2017) and disrupted sleep is an established risk factor for PD in adulthood (Stein & Friedmann, 2005). Furthermore, consistent with a systems perspective (Ford & Lerner, 1992), exposure to PPD may lead to disruption in children's sleep, which in turn might forecast greater PPD and a repetitive cycle may ensue.…”

Family Functioning and Children's Sleep

“…To explain transactional dynamics in family members’ sleep, we examined children’s, mothers’, and fathers’ sleep nightly for 1 week (28). In children, duration and quality of sleep were predicted by fluctuations in mothers’ sleep, and mothers’ sleep was predicted by children’s and fathers’ sleep.…”