Infants Sleep Habits Influenced By Parental Relationships, Feuds

Editor's Choice
Academic Journal
Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 12 May 2011 - 2:00 PDT


Infants are very delicate at those initial development stages, and a new study has found that family feuding in the home, which often keeps the little ones up at night, does have an impact on future development and how future sleep patterns form for life. Instability in a parents' relationship when the infant was nine months old still affected the child when they were 18 months old.

Babies can be taught the difference between night and day. Because the average infant sleeps about sixteen hours per day, this only leaves about eight hours that he or she will be awake. Therefore, parents need to concentrate these wakeful times in the daytime hours. It only makes sense that babies will be livelier at night if they have been sleeping all day.

Professor Gordon Harold, of the School of Psychology at the University of Leicester comments:

"Regulated sleep is essential during infancy for healthy brain and physical development. Disrupted sleep patterns early in life have serious implications for children's long-term development. How couples and parents relate to each other, specifically how they manage conflicts in their everyday lives is also recognized as having significant implications for children's long term emotional, behavioral and academic development. Understanding which comes first, children's sleep problems affecting parent relationship quality or parent relationship quality affecting children's sleep problems has significant clinical implications."

There is a very unique twist to this study however upon reading deeper into the research. A most important and unique feature of the study was that the children and caregivers who took part in the study were adoptive children and parents, with all children in the study adopted at birth.

This variable was introduced by design.

Professor Harold who is Chair in Behavioral Genetics and Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Leicester explains further:

"When parents and children are biologically related, any association between how parents behave and attributes of child behavior may be explained by common genetic factors (same genes underlying parent and child behavior). The present study rules this explanation out in those parents/caregivers and children are not genetically related, so common genetic factors cannot account for the associations noted. This study does not negate the importance of genetic (nature) and biological factors underlying children's development but does locate the dynamic between couples as a unique family "environmental" influence (nurture) on children's early development."

Professor Harold said this is a very important feature of the study in that it allows the researchers to examine whether another possible explanation for any association between family relationships influences, such as couple relationship instability, on child behavior, such as disrupted sleep patterns, may be a product of shared genetic influences between parents and children. Using a sample of over 300 children and their caregivers in the United States, the association between infant sleep problems and parent's relationship instability was examined when children were 9 months and 18 months. Results were such that parents' relationship instability at 9 months predicted infant sleep problems at 18 months.

Harold concludes:

"So, how parents relate to each other affects children's sleep patterns, rather than sleep patterns affecting parents' relationship quality; thereby significantly informing our understanding of early family relationship influences on children's development."

Source: The Society for Research in Child Development

Written by Sy Kraft
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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