Cross-national research suggests cultural factors affect how parents manage and perceive their children's sleep. In the United States, however, it is unclear whether documented racial/ethnic differences in these aspects of children's sleep reflect culturally distinct parental values and practices or confounding sociodemographic factors. This study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Well Being Study to examine potential racial/ethnic differences in how parents manage and perceive the sleep of their preschool children (n = 3,068), while controlling for potential sociodemographic (e.g., family structure), environmental (e.g., number of available bedrooms), and pragmatic (e.g., parental shift work) confounds. Results suggest racial/ethnic differences exist in where children sleep, how they are put to bed, and the level of concern mothers have about their child's sleep, beyond the effect of confounding factors. These differences may reflect distinct cultural values, as well as diverse goals for family and parent-child relationships. As our country becomes increasingly heterogeneous, it is important for developmental researchers and pediatric providers to understand the various ways diversity may be reflected in family life.
Exposure to racism has been linked to poor health outcomes. Little is known about the impact of racism on diabetes outcomes. This study explored African American (AA) women's beliefs about how racism interacts with their diabetes self-management and control. Four focus groups were conducted with a convenience sample of 28 adult AA women with type 2 diabetes who were recruited from a larger quantitative study on racism and diabetes. The focus group discussions were transcribed verbatim and analyzed by the authors. Women reported that exposure to racism was a common phenomenon, and their beliefs did in fact link racism to poor health. Specifically, women reported that exposure to racism caused physiological arousal including cardiovascular and metabolic perturbations. There was consensus that physiological arousal was generally detrimental to health. Women also described limited, and in some cases maladaptive, strategies to cope with racist events including eating unhealthy food choices and portions. There was consensus that the subjective nature of perceiving racism and accompanying social prohibitions often made it impossible to address racism directly. Many women described anger in such situations, and the tendency to internalize anger and other negative emotions, only to find that the negative emotions would be reactivated repeatedly with exposure to novel racial stressors, even long after the original racist event remitted. AA women in this study believed that racism affects their diabetes self-management and control. Health beliefs can exert powerful effects on health behaviors and may provide an opportunity for health promotion interventions in diabetes.
Drawing from transactional models, the authors examined whether attachment security measured at age 3 (a potential source of differential vulnerability) interacts with the course of maternal depressive symptoms over an 8-year period (a potential source of differential exposure) in predicting children's self-reported depressive symptoms at age 11. Participants were from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (N = 938). Results from growth curve modeling and analysis of covariance suggest that preschool attachment quality moderates the influence of subsequent maternal depression on children. In particular, variability in the course of maternal depressive symptoms predicted offspring depressive symptoms only among those children with an insecure attachment history. A potential protective effect of early attachment security was evident among children exposed to the most chronic levels of maternal depression. Of the children with different patterns of insecure attachments, those with behaviors classified as disorganized appeared most vulnerable to also becoming depressed if paired with a mother experiencing ongoing depressive symptoms.
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