Poster #1 - Examining Sleep as a protective Mechanism for Executive Functioning in Children from Low-Income Homes

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

For young children, sleep is essential for healthy development across a wide variety of areas. Inadequate sleep can affect emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and health outcomes in early childhood, and can lead to poor outcomes later in life. Low family income and resources can put children at risk for poor sleep quality, impairing their subsequent cognitive abilities, particularly those related to executive functioning. While sleep in early childhood and its effects on executive functioning have been studied, the interaction between family income and sleep habits and their associations with cognitive functioning is less well known.
The current study examined sleep quality as a protective factor against the negative effects of low socioeconomic status (SES) on children’s executive functioning skills, specifically those of working memory and inhibition. It was hypothesized that SES would moderate the association between children’s sleep quality and executive functioning such that children from low-SES homes would display worse executive functioning skills when experiencing poor sleep quality. This study examined these associations by drawing from a large data set collected for a preschool expansion project in the Midwest. Parents filled out surveys related to their children’s sleep habits (quality and quantity; TCSQ; McGreavy et al., 2005) and executive functioning (CHEXI; Thorell & Nyberg, 2008), as well as demographics questionnaires determining family income, children’s age, and gender. Participants included 92 families, the children of which were on average 56 months, or 4 years, 8 months of age at the time of the study (SD = 3.7 months; 60% female). The average family income fell within the $25,000 - $42,000 range. Within the sample, 14.1% of families fell under the federal poverty line of $25,000 for a family of four.
We regressed EF scores, measured in the two domains of working memory and inhibition, onto sleep quality and family income and the interaction between sleep quality and income as well as covariates (age and gender). Poor sleep quality and low family income were associated with poorer performances in working memory but not inhibition (B = -0.247, p = -.016; (B = -0.118, p = .243). The association between sleep quality and working memory was specific to children from low-SES homes (B = 0.448, p = .003; See Figure 1). Exploratory analyses revealed that sleep length was not associated with either working memory or inhibition. These results suggest that good sleep quality could buffer against poor executive functioning skills for children from low-SES homes. Future studies should attempt to measure these associations longitudinally so as to determine causal links between these variables.

Authors

• Sara Elizabeth Wetter, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
  Presenting Author

• Mary Fuhs, University of Dayton
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jackson Goodnight, University of Dayton
  Non-Presenting Author