Do parents’ support behaviours predict whether or not their children get sufficient sleep? A cross-sectional study

Abstract

BackgroundSleep is an essential component of healthy cognitive and physical development. Lack of sleep may put children at risk for a variety of mental and physical health outcomes, including overweight, obesity and related chronic diseases. Given that children’s sleep duration has decreased in recent decades, there is a need to understand the determinants of child sleep, including the role of parental support behaviours. This study aims to determine the relative contribution of different types of parental support behaviours for predicting the likelihood that children meet recently established Canadian sleep guidelines.MethodsData were collected using Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) of parents or guardians with at least one child under the age of 18 living in Ontario, Canada. To align with sleep guidelines, parents included in this analysis had at least one child between 5 and 17 years of age (n = 1622). Two multivariable logistic regression models were built to predict whether or not parents reported their child was meeting sleep guidelines – one for weekday sleep and another for sleep on weekends. Independent variables included parent and child age and gender, motivational and regulatory parental support behaviours, and socio-demographic characteristics.ResultsOn weekdays, enforcing rules about child bedtime was a significant positive predictor of children meeting sleep guidelines (OR: 1.59; 95% CI: 1.03–2.44); while encouraging the child to go to bed at a specific time was a significant negative predictor of child meeting sleep guidelines (OR: 0.29; 95% CI: 0.13–0.65). On weekends, none of the parental support behaviours contributed significantly to the predictions of child sleep. For both weekdays and weekends, the child’s age group was an important predictor of children meeting sleep guidelines.ConclusionsThe contribution of parental support behaviours to predictions of children meeting sleep guidelines varied with the type of support provided, and weekend versus weekday sleep. While only enforcing bedtime rules on weekdays contributed to children meeting sleep guidelines, the importance of children getting a good night’s sleep, and the capacity of parents to help them do so, should be emphasized in public health efforts promoting healthy child development.

Healthy or Unhealthy? The Cocktail of Health-Related Behavior Profiles in Spanish Adolescents

“…Our results showed that the proportion of students meeting sleep duration guidelines (89%) was considerably higher than in previous studies [7]. The existence of parental rules, oriented at increasing, or at least, at placing importance on adolescents' bedtime in this age group, could explain why all the adolescents in the different retained profiles met the sleep duration recommendations [57]. The number of students meeting guidelines for PA (21.4%) and screen time (1.7%) was lower than reported by previous international studies [7,46,58].…”

Relationship Between Bullying Behaviours And Sleep Quality In School-Aged Children

“…We emphasize that in the global sample, sleep problems are frequent, and may constitute an "invisible risk" for other problems (Carli, Hoven, Wasserman, Chiesa, Guffanti, & Sarchiapone, 2014). These results are in line with recent findings, which report the high frequency of sleep disturbances in today's Western society (Pyper, Harrington & Manson, 2017;Cheung, Bedford, Urabain, Karmiloff-Smith, & Smith, 2017). Therefore, we cannot ignore the sleep difficulties that these children have and we must reflect about the relationships between this general sleep poor quality and other types of behaviour and disturbances.…”

“…Recent studies indicate that the sleep duration of children has decreased in the last few decades about 30 to 60 minutes, and it is important to understand the characteristics and restrictive factors for children's sleep, bringing in parental support behaviours to this understanding (Pyper, Harrington, & Manson, 2017).…”

Application of the Multi‐Process Action Control Framework to Understand Parental Support of Child and Youth Physical Activity, Sleep, and Screen Time Behaviours

“…Parental support of sleep (Pyper, Harrington, & Manson, ), sedentary behaviour (Xu, Wen, & Rissel, ), and PA (Rhodes & Quinlan, ) has received much research attention, given that children and youth spend considerable time in the care of their parents. There are several different measures and conceptions of a construct as complex as parental support (Trost, McDonald, & Cohen, ), which is an umbrella term that represents the functional characteristics associated with the interactions between a parent and his/her children in promoting behaviours (Beets, Cardinal, & Alderman, ; Pyper, Harrington, & Manson, ).…”