Children's Night Waking among Toddlers: Relationships with Mothers' & Fathers' Parenting Approaches & Children's Behavioural Difficulties

AIMS:

To explore associations between children's sleep problems, and behavioural difficulties and parenting approaches.

BACKGROUND:

Children commonly have problematic night waking; however, relationships between parenting cognitions and behaviours and children's sleep problems are rarely examined.

DESIGN:

Longitudinal children's cohort study from 5-29 months post birth.

METHODS:

Data were taken from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (1998-2007) at three phases: 5, 17 and 29 months of age. Thousand four hundred and eighty-seven families were included in our study based on: participation from phase 1 (5-months old), both parents' reports on parenting cognitions/behaviours and child behavioural difficulties at 29 months, and mothers' reports of children's sleep at 29 months. In 2013, we conducted repeated measures anovas and manovas including children's gender.

RESULTS:

Extended night-time waking patterns (wakes of ≥ 20 minutes) were associated with mothers' and fathers' lower sense of parenting impact and higher over protectiveness and mothers' lower self-efficacy and higher coerciveness for 29-month-old children. In the extended waking group, mothers consistently reported lower self-efficacy, higher over protectiveness and lower parenting impact at 5, 17 and 29 months. For those children, fathers were only more overprotective at 5 and 29 months. Regarding 29-month-old children's behaviour, children in the extended night waking group had highest scores on externalizing and internalizing behaviours. Girls had higher scores on shyness/inhibition and boys had higher scores on aggression/hyperactivity.

CONCLUSION:

Mothers' and fathers' parenting cognitions and behaviours are affected by 29-month-old children's night waking patterns and night waking patterns are associated with children's behavioural problems.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/sjvRnN

By:  Zaidman-Zait A1,2, Hall WA3.

• 1Department of School Counseling and Special Education, Constantiner School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
• 2Department of Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), University of British Columbia (http://earlylearning.ubc.ca/), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• 3University of British Columbia School of Nursing, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
• J Adv Nurs. 2015 Jul;71(7):1639-49. doi: 10.1111/jan.12636. Epub 2015 Feb 18.

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison Health