There are remarkable racial differences in reported napping and nighttime sleep patterns beginning as early as age 3 and extending to at least 8 years of age. These differences are independent of commonly investigated demographic factors. Differences in napping behavior do not seem to have psychosocial significance in a sample of preschool children.

Mechanisms were examined to clarify relations between maternal depressive symptoms, dysfunctional cognitions, and infant night waking among 45 infants (1-24 months) and their mothers. A mother-driven mediational model was tested in which maternal depressive symptoms and dysfunctional cognitions about infant sleep predicted infant night waking via their impact on mothers' bedtime and nighttime behavior with infants (from video). Two infant-driven mediational models were also examined, in which infant night waking predicted maternal depressive symptoms, or dysfunctional cognitions, via their impact on nighttime maternal behavior. Stronger support for the mother-driven model was obtained, which was further supported by qualitative observations from video-recordings. This study provides important insights about maternal depression's effects on nighttime parenting, and how such parenting affects infant sleep.

Enzo (Enzo Developers, 2019a) is a block-structured adaptive mesh refinement code that is widely used to simulate astrophysical fluid flows (primarily, but not exclusively, cosmological structure formation, star formation, and turbulence). The code is a community project with dozens of users, and has contributed to hundreds of peer-reviewed publications in astrophysics, physics, and computer science. The code utilizes a Cartesian mesh can be run in one, two, or

Household chaos is a construct often overlooked in studies of human development, despite its theoretical links with the integrity of individual well-being, family processes, and child development. The present longitudinal study examined relations between household chaos and well-established correlates of chaos (sociodemographic risk, major life events, and personal distress) and several constructs that, to date, are theoretically linked with chaos but never before assessed as correlates (quality of coparenting and emotional availability with infants at bedtime). In addressing this aim, we introduce a new measure of household chaos (the Descriptive In-home Survey of Chaos--Observer ReporteD, or DISCORD), wholly reliant on independent observer report, which draws from household chaos theory and prior empirical work but extends the measurement of chaos to include information about families' compliance with a home visiting protocol. Household chaos was significantly associated with socioeconomic risk, negative life events, less favorable coparenting, and less emotionally available bedtime parenting, but not with personal distress. These findings emphasize the need to examine household chaos as a direct and indirect influence on child and family outcomes, as a moderator of intervention attempts to improving parenting and child development, and as a target of intervention in its own right.

The present longitudinal study addressed the ongoing debate regarding the benefits and risks of infant-parent co-sleeping by examining associations between sleep arrangement patterns across the first year of life and infant and parent sleep, marital and family functioning, and quality of mothers’ behavior with infants at bedtime. Patterns of infant sleep arrangements across the infants’ first year were derived from information obtained from 139 families at 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of infant age in a U.S., central Pennsylvanian sample. Linkages between these patterns and parent-infant sleep, marital and coparenting stress, and maternal behavior at bedtime (from video-recordings) were assessed. Compared to families whose infants were solitary sleepers by 6 months, persistent co-sleeping was associated with sleep disruption in mothers but not in infants, although mothers in persistent co-sleeping arrangements reported that their infants had more frequent night awakenings. Persistent co-sleeping was also associated with mother reports of marital and coparenting distress, and lower maternal emotional availability with infants at bedtime (from home observations). Persistent co-sleeping appeared to be a marker of, though not necessarily a cause of, heightened family stress, although the present design did not enable strong tests of causal processes, and results may be particular to cultures that are not supportive of co-sleeping. Findings are discussed in terms of cultural contexts of infant sleep and the need for further investigations into the role of the health of the family system in influencing how parents structure infant sleep.