Poster #137 - Don't Lose Sleep Over it? Psychological Functioning, Postpartum Sleep and Parenting in African-American Mothers

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Much of the literature focuses on quality of infant sleep, while few studies examine maternal sleep, which is equally important, as the two patterns bear natural influence on one another. Maternal sleep often suffers in the first six months postpartum (Hunter, Rychnovsky, & Yount, 2009), and while directionality is unclear, this has been associated with characteristics such as maternal depression and anxiety (Okun et al., 2018). Despite the oft-studied relationship between maternal psychological distress and parenting behaviors (Goodman et al., 2011), to our knowledge, no study to date has examined associations between these factors, and maternal sleep in infancy. The present study thus leveraged a sample n = 65 of African-American mothers of 3-month old infants to explore how self-reported sleep quality mediates the association between maternal psychological functioning and observer-rated parenting behaviors. The current study fills a critical gap in the literature, as low-income African-American mothers tend to experience the most significant postpartum sleep problems (Mezick et al., 2008; Pigeon et al., 2011), and yet this minority population remains understudied.

All measurements were completed 3-months postpartum. Postnatal psychological functioning was assessed using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Maternal self-ratings of sleep were completed via the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). The PSQI measures seven subscale sleep components; of these, we investigated three in line with our hypotheses, 1) daytime dysfunction, 2) sleep duration, and 3) global index of sleep. An adapted version of the Three-Bag Assessment (Brady-Smith, O' Brien, Berlin, & Ware, 1999) was used to code an unstructured five-minute interaction between mother-infant dyads when infants were three-months of age. Coders were blind to levels of maternal psychological functioning and sleep quality. Inter-rater reliability was greater than 70%. We collapsed parenting variables into Positive Parenting and Negative Parenting indices.

Maternal depression and anxiety were significantly associated with increased daytime dysfunction (Beta = 0.62, p < 0.01; Beta = 0.33, p < 0.01), decreased sleep duration (Beta= 0.32, p < 0.01; Beta = 0.34, p < 0.01), and worse global sleep quality (Beta = 0.52, p < 0.01; Beta = 0.38, p < 0.01). Maternal age was positively associated with Positive Parenting (r = 0.27, p = 0.03), as was maternal education (r = 0.25, p = 0.04). There was no main effect of maternal psychological functioning on parenting, nor an indirect effect of sleep-related problems on parenting.

These results suggest that neither psychopathology nor sleep difficulties drive early parenting quality, which is inconsistent with previous research. It is possible that variations in parenting strategies with three-month olds might be limited by their lack of mobility and speech. Perhaps these relationships will change later in development. It might also be that a videotaped observation of the mother-child interaction may have been a poor approximation of true parenting behaviors. Demand characteristics would be high in this context. It may be that sociodemographic factors (similar to our covariates maternal age, education level) are more strongly related to parenting. Future work will delve into these associations.

Authors

• Madeleine Flora Cohen, Doctoral Student
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Corwin, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Dunlop, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Patricia A Brennan, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author