Noncompliance and Negative Affect during Toy Prohibition: Effects of Sleep Onset Latency and Temperament

• In Event: Sleep and Behavioral Adjustment in Early and Middle Childhood

Abstract

Toddlerhood is a period of increasing autonomy and independence. For many 2-3-year-olds, this manifests as increased noncompliance to parental directives, for example by refusing to clean up toys or increased resistance at bedtime. Resistance at bedtime may be related to difficulty falling asleep, leading to longer sleep onset latency. General noncompliance could reflect normative growth in noncompliance as well as individual differences in children’s temperamental manageability. More temperamentally unmanageable children and those who take longer to fall asleep may be more noncompliant during challenging situations. However, longer sleep latency could also reflect feelings of insecurity that, when combined with increased temperamental unmanageability and a challenging task, could lead to increased negative affect. Thus, for temperamentally unmanageable children, longer sleep onset latency may amplify both noncompliance and expressed negative affect compared to more temperamentally manageable children. This study explored the moderating role of sleep onset latency on the link between temperamental unmanageability (parent-report) and child regulation (lab task) accounting for child sex in a sample of young children.

Parents and their 30-month-old children (N = 215; male = 116; female = 99) participated in a study on sleep and the development of self-control. Temperamental unmanageability was assessed from maternal ratings on the Infant Behavior Questionnaire Resistance to Control scale (M = 12.61; SD = 2.90). Sleep onset latency (SOL) before the lab visit was the average time to fall asleep (M = 39.45 minutes; SD = 26.92) based on 7 nights of actigraphy and diary-recorded bedtimes. Compliance was measured in a laboratory task that was preceded by 5 minutes of free play with the parent followed by 4 minutes (approx.) during which the parent completed a phone interview. Parents instructed their children to play with the less interesting toys at the table and not to play with more attractive toys on a nearby cart. Toy prohibition, the focal task of the present analysis, began with parents leaving the room to get additional toys. Noncompliance, i.e., playing with the attractive toys, and expressions of negative affect were coded.

Table 1 contains the results of multiple regression predicting noncompliance and negative affect (separately) from child sex, SOL, temperamental unmanageability, and the interaction between SOL and temperament. Greater noncompliance was predicted by being male, having longer SOL, and greater temperamental unmanageability (the interaction was not significant). Negative affect was predicted by SOL, temperamental unmanageability, and their interaction. Simple slopes analysis (Figure) revealed that longer SOL was associated with greater negative affect for temperamentally manageable children but less negative affect for temperamentally unmanageable children. Given this unexpected finding, noncompliance was added to the model to test whether playing with the prohibited toys may have affected children’s negative affect. Indeed, greater noncompliance was associated with less negative affect. These findings highlight complex relations between temperament, sleep, noncompliance, and children’s negative emotionality. One possibility is that temperamentally manageable children with difficulty falling asleep become more distressed when their parent leaves because they do not distract themselves by playing with the forbidden, attractive toys.

Authors

• Angela D Staples, Eastern Michigan University
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Hicks, Eastern Michigan University
  Non-Presenting Author

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