Understanding healthful sleep patterns in the first years of life.
Getting a good night’s sleep is essential for children’s health and development. Sleep problems in young children have been linked to a range of adjustment difficulties, including attention deficits, conduct problems, day‐time sleepiness, and academic underachievement. Research also shows that sleep problems that are evident in children’s first year of life persist over time, underscoring the significance of studying parents’ role in infants’ sleep patterns. Dr. Douglas Teti, along with several co‐investigators from Penn State, have begun the SIESTA project, supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in an effort to better understand what contributes to healthful sleep patterns in the first two years of life.
When recruitment is complete, Project SIESTA will include 150 families with infants. This longitudinal project begins when infants are one‐month old and continues until their second birthday. In addition to self‐reports from both mothers and fathers, video recordings are also used to capture family dynamics: on five consecutive nights, families are recorded from the onset of the infant’s bedtime routine to the next morning when the infant wakes for the day. Additionally, the SIESTA team is collecting physiological data, including saliva samples that are used to assay the stress hormone, cortisol.
Dr. Teti explains, “Very little is known about parenting of children at night and its role in the promotion of sleep quality in infants and in parent‐infant relations more broadly. This is true in spite of the fact that everyone seems to have pretty strong opinions about what parents should be doing with infants at night, about when infants should be able to ‘sleep through the night’, and so forth. Project SIESTA is a study of the social environment of infant sleep. It provides observational data on what parents do and how they do it, how parenting at night and infant sleep quality are influenced by (and influence) marital quality and other family processes, and how parent‐infant sleeping patterns predict parent‐infant relational outcomes across the first two years. We expect that SIESTA will yield a rich empirical data base on these topics."
Although SIESTA is still recruiting new families, some results have already been presented and published. As reported in a 2010 article in the Journal of Family Psychology parents range in the amount of time it takes them to put their infants to sleep—anywhere from a few minutes to nearly two hours. But, a more important factor in promoting sound sleeping was mothers’ emotional availability at bedtime. SIESTA has also contributed to current perspectives on co‐sleeping. In a 2010 article in Infant Mental Health Journal Teti and colleagues reported that both mothers and fathers of infants who co‐ slept in the same bed or bedroom reported poor adaptation to their child’s sleep compared to parents of infants who slept in a separate room. Further, mothers who shared sleeping space with their infants slept less efficiently, faced more spousal criticism for their sleeping arrangements, and reported more depressive symptoms than mothers of infants who slept separately. Importantly, however, mothers who were less prone to depression and who were not criticized by their partners about where their infant slept did not display problems with their co‐sleeping arrangement.
Finally, SIESTA has also contributed to the literature on co‐parenting, that is, how well mothers and fathers work together as a team in bringing up their children. Findings revealed that at the age of one month, infants with parents who had higher quality co‐parenting were more likely to have healthful cortisol patterns. Co‐parenting quality in infancy was also related to child adjustment: more positive coparenting predicted fewer behavioral and emotional problems and better self regulation when children were one year old.
Project SIESTA has several co‐investigators from Penn State’s departments of Human Development and Family Studies (Cynthia Stifter, Michael Rovine) and Psychology (Pamela Cole), from Hershey Medical Center’s Department of Pediatrics (Ian Paul), and from the University of California, Davis (Thomas Anders).