3-173 - Sleep and Stress: Examining environmental risk, poor sleep and stress physiology in parents and children

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Sleep is a core biologic process, sensitive to numerous environmental factors and implicated in physical and mental health. Increasingly, attention has focused on the role sleep plays in well-being and on interventions to support healthy sleep. Although a robust literature examines these interacting factors in adults and in adolescence, and an emerging literature focuses on young children, relatively little is known about the co-occurrence of stress and sleep problems in parents and their children. This is despite the fact that parent stress and sleep likely affect child stress and sleep and vice versa. This symposium will address this gap, and stimulate discussion about necessary future directions. In paper 1, an experimental sleep deprivation protocol in toddlers results in higher cortisol during frustration on days where a nap is missed. This experiment provides clear evidence that sleep deprivation can result in elevated stress physiology. In paper 2, the effects of poverty-related stress on mother’s sleep and diurnal cortisol was examined in a sample of mothers with a child in Early Head Start in New York City. Economic hardship and sleep both impacted mother’s diurnal cortisol. In paper 3, environmental risk, maternal and child sleep, and maternal and child diurnal cortisol were examined in an Early Head Start sample in the Denver metro area. Many cross-correlations emerged and sleep problems mediated some of the effects of environmental risk on diurnal cortisol. All findings will be discussed in light of prevention and intervention in early childhood, for both parents and their children.

Sub Unit

• Health, Growth, Injury

Chair

• Lisa Schlueter, University of Denver

Discussant

• Ronald Seifer, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Nap Deprivation Effects on Cortisol Reactivity in Toddlers - Presenting Author: Rebekah Tribble, University of Denver; Monique LeBourgeois, University of Colorado Boulder

• Sleep, Stress, Executive Function and Changes in Diurnal Salivary Cortisol in a Sample of Mothers of Young Children in Poverty - Presenting Author: Clancy B. Blair, New York University; C Cybele Raver, New York University

• Environmental Stress, Parent & Child Sleep Problems, and Dysregulated Parent and Child Cortisol: A Wicked Cycle? - Lisa Schlueter, University of Denver; Presenting Author: Sarah Enos Watamura, University of Denver; Elanah Barrow, University of Denver; Amy Dominguez, University of Denver; Marina M. Mendoza, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice