Poster #158 - The Role of Acute vs Typical Sleep Efficiency on Observed Maternal Behavior

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Longitudinal research with young children has shown that greater use of positive control strategies is associated with increased child compliance (Kochanska & Aksan, 2004). For parents of young children, feeling more fatigued and sleeping fewer hours is associated with decreased use of positive control strategies when asked to keep their child from playing with desirable toys (White, Bradley, Neverve, Stirewalt, & Summers, 2015). The present study extends this work by using objective (actigraphic) measures of both typical (across one week) and acute (from the night before visiting the lab) parent sleep deficits to examine the relative contributions of these sleep deficits and child behavior on parenting behavior during a related lab task. We hypothesized that acute sleep deficits, compared to typical maternal sleep deficits, would be more strongly, inversely associated with observed positive parenting. Additionally, the effect of poor sleep was hypothesized to be greater when mother’s attention was divided between speaking on the phone and interacting with her child.

236 mothers and their 30-month-old children participated in a wider, longitudinal study. Maternal sleep was assessed with diary and actigraphy for one week prior to the lab visit (Table 1). Sleep efficiency was the average percentage of time asleep while in bed excluding the night before the lab visit. Sleep efficiency the night before lab the lab visit was highly correlated with average sleep efficiency (r = .75, p < .01). In the lab, the dyad was observed during free play (5 minutes) and during a phone interview between the experimenter and the mother (M = 3.41 minutes, SD = 0.93). During both tasks, mothers were instructed to prevent their child from playing with toys on a nearby shelf. Behaviors were coded—separately for mother and child—as the proportion of 15s intervals. For maternal behavior, intervals were coded as social exchanges with the child (e.g., conversation, gestures, use of toys) and/or positive control of the child’s behavior (e.g., through suggestions, distractions, or reasoning). For child behavior, mutually exclusive codes were either play, when the child was engaged with the table toys, or prohibited, when the child looked towards the prohibited shelf toys.

Multiple regression models predicting Positive Control and Social Exchange tested the effects of child behavior (Play and Prohibited) and maternal sleep efficiency (average and night before) (Table 2). As expected, there was greater social exchange when the child played with the toys at the table and greater positive control when the child was attending to the shelf of prohibited toys. Contrary to expectations, after accounting for child behavior, maternal sleep efficiency was not predictive of maternal behavior during the free play task or of social exchange while completing the phone interview. Sleep efficiency was, however, predictive of positive control during the phone interview. Specifically, greater sleep efficiency on average predicted less positive control while greater sleep efficiency the night before the lab visit predicted greater positive control. This suggests that acute and typical sleep differentially influence parenting in measurable ways over and above child behavior.

Authors

• Angela D. Staples, Eastern Michigan University
  Presenting Author

• Maureen E. McQuillan, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Author

• John Bates, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Non-Presenting Author