Multiple Facets of Sleep Are Linked to Preschoolers’ School Readiness

• In Event: 2-156 - Child Sleep, Parenting, and School Readiness

Integrative Statement

The construct of school readiness describes young children’s cognitive and social abilities that predict later academic and adjustment outcomes. An important literature on school readiness has considered many factors that may account for individual differences in the development of school readiness, but is just beginning to consider sleep variables. Deficient amount and quality of children’s sleep and other sleep disturbances relate to maladaptive outcomes, including poor cognitive development, increased behavior problems, and poor self-regulation, so it is reasonable to expect relations with school readiness abilities. The current study examined associations between sleep and school readiness in a sample of preschoolers. Given the demonstrated links between sleep problems and cognitive and behavioral functioning in older children and adults, we expected preschoolers with more sleep disturbances to have lower school readiness compared to those with better sleep.
Participants included 97 children (49 female) who were assessed at 54 months of age as part of a longitudinal study. Several measures aimed at assessing school readiness were collected, including individually administered scales from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement, 3rd Edition (WJ-III; Woodcock et al., 2007), including the applied problem subscale and the letter-word identification subscale. Measures of child behavioral or social adjustment were teacher reports on the aggression, attention, and overall externalizing problems subscales from Caregiver-Teacher Report Form for Ages 1 ½ - 5 (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000) and the aggressive with peers and excluded by peers subscale of the Child Behavior Scale (Ladd & Profilet, 1996).
Child sleep was assessed using an actigraph, a device that monitors motor activity and uses algorithms to determine sleep and wake periods. Children wore the actigraphs for a period of a week. The current study used a comprehensive selection of actigraphy variables to represent the major domains of sleep disturbances. These variables are described in Table 1.
Pearson correlations, shown in Table 2, demonstrated a broad pattern of associations between children’s sleep and their academic abilities and classroom adjustment. Concerning academic abilities, children with later bedtimes or shorter sleep durations performed worse on the applied problems subscale, and children who took longer to fall asleep at night performed worse on the letter-word identification subscale. Concerning social adjustment, children with shorter sleep durations, more variability in their sleep schedule, or longer sleep latencies were higher on teacher-reported aggression, attention problems, and externalizing problems. Children with more variable sleep schedules or longer sleep latencies showed more peer social problems, including peer aggression and exclusion.
These findings suggest that aspects of preschoolers’ school readiness are associated with aspects of their sleep. Preschoolers with sleep disturbances had poorer school readiness, both on measures of academic abilities and social adjustment in the classroom. Sleep constructs deserve further exploration as factors in school readiness, as they could represent both environmental and constitutional processes with importance for developmental theory and clinical and educational practice.

Authors

• John Bates, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Presenting Author

• Caroline Page Hoyniak, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angela D. Staples, Eastern Michigan University
  Non-Presenting Author