Poster #8 - Child Sleep Predicts Maternal Cortisol Levels

• In Event: Poster Session 10

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic as a stressor has increased the prevalence of sleep disturbances in the general public (see Lin et al., 2021 for review). The effects have been particularly deleterious for mothers. Evidence suggests that, a unit increase in maternal stress during the COVID-19 lockdown resulted in them being 19% less likely to meet required sleep guidelines (Kracht et al., 2021). At the same time, mother outcomes are integrally linked to child outcomes, and the relative contribution of maternal and child sleep on maternal stress is much less understood. In mothers of school-age children, child sleep disturbances negatively influence maternal sleep quality, which is related to greater maternal distress (Meltzer & Mindell, 2007). However, extant studies have utilized self-report surveys as measures of subjective stress, and there is a dearth of research that has examined the physiological impact of maternal sleep, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study seeks to examine the influence of maternal and child sleep on maternal stress, as indexed by hair cortisol, which is a marker of cumulative stress (Liu & Doan, 2019).
Using longitudinal data from a larger study on family dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the association between mothers’ and child’s sleep quality and maternal hair cortisol levels collected at two time-points during the pandemic: T1 from June-August 2020 and T2 from February-April 2021. We hypothesized that both, maternal and child poorer sleep quality, as well as COVID-related stress will increase maternal hair cortisol levels.
Participants were 117 mothers who identified as 60% White, 47% had annual income above $100,000 and 51% had graduate degrees. 49% of children were girls, as identified by their mothers, with a mean child age of 72.68 months. Sleep quality of the mother and child were measured by the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index and total standardized mean of Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System Sleep Impairment and Disturbance scales respectively. The impact of COVID-related stressors was measured with the survey used in Liu et al (2022). We ran a linear regression using the Full Information Maximum Likelihood method (comparative results were found with listwise deletion) using child sleep disturbance, maternal sleep quality, COVID-related stressors, and maternal hair cortisol at T1 to predict maternal hair cortisol at T2, controlling for child gender, socio-economic status (SES), maternal age and race. Child sleep disturbance, b = .270, SE = .104, p = .009 and maternal hair cortisol, b = .328, SE = .081, p < .001 at T1 positively predicted maternal hair cortisol at T2 (Table 1). Our findings show that it is child sleep quality, not mothers' own sleep quality or COVID-related stressors that is a predictor of maternal stress, indexed through hair cortisol. Specifically, child sleep impairment at T1 during the initial stages of a global pandemic predicted maternal cumulative stress later in the pandemic at T2. These results suggest that improving child sleep quality could be a way to decrease maternal chronic stress.

Authors

• Jocelyn Wen-Ting Chang, Scripps College
  Presenting Author

• Christine Esther Ha, Pomona College

• Shruthi Venkatesh, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Patricia A Smiley, Pomona College

• Stacey N Doan, Claremont Mckenna College