The sleep of the child – the parent's stressor? : A study within the ABIS project

Abstract: Poor sleep and chronic stress are important factors detrimental to physical and mental health. This is no less true for children than for adults. Therefore, investigating sleep and stress patterns in early life is important. Since children live in a close relationship to their parents, the sleep and stress patterns of the parents is likely to influence those of the children. In this thesis, the relationships between parent-reported child sleep quality, self-reported parent sleep quality, and parenting stress as measured by the Swedish Parenting Stress Questionnaire (SPSQ) have been investigated. Several background factors have been tested for associations to parent and child sleep quality and parenting stress, and their possible involvement in the associations between sleep and stress measures has been investigated. The hypotheses were that child sleep, parental sleep and parenting stress show concurrent intermeasure associations and longitudinal intrameasure stability, which should also generate longitudinal intermeasure associations. The participants were parents of about 10000 children in the ABIS study, born in south-east Sweden in the years 1997-99. Questionnaires were gathered at birth and at 1, 3 and 5 years and data analyzed statistically The hypotheses were supported: sleep and stress measures showed strong concurrent associations and longitudinal stability. However, parental sleep quality seems to explain most of the child sleep-parenting stress association.All background factors except child gender showed some level of association to sleep and stress measures at least at some age. No background factor had any effect on the associations between sleep and stress measures when included in logistic regression. Our data does not support the hypothesis that night feedings condition the child to night wakings. A possible predictor of persistent sleep problems is found in uncertainty about the cause of night wakings.To conclude, parent-perceived child sleep quality has a connection to parenting stress which in our data is mainly explained through parental sleep quality. This is important to consider when advising parents that complain about their child/ren's sleep quality.