Children's night waking among toddlers: relationships with mothers' and fathers' parenting approaches and children's behavioural difficulties.

AIMS

To explore associations between children's sleep problems, and behavioural difficulties and parenting approaches.

BACKGROUND

Children commonly have problematic night waking; however, relationships between parenting cognitions and behaviours and children's sleep problems are rarely examined.

DESIGN

Longitudinal children's cohort study from 5-29 months post birth.

METHODS

Data were taken from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (1998-2007) at three phases: 5, 17 and 29 months of age. Thousand four hundred and eighty-seven families were included in our study based on: participation from phase 1 (5-months old), both parents' reports on parenting cognitions/behaviours and child behavioural difficulties at 29 months, and mothers' reports of children's sleep at 29 months. In 2013, we conducted repeated measures anovas and manovas including children's gender.

RESULTS

Extended night-time waking patterns (wakes of ≥20 minutes) were associated with mothers' and fathers' lower sense of parenting impact and higher overprotectiveness and mothers' lower self-efficacy and higher coerciveness for 29-month-old children. In the extended waking group, mothers consistently reported lower self-efficacy, higher overprotectiveness and lower parenting impact at 5, 17 and 29 months. For those children, fathers were only more overprotective at 5 and 29 months. Regarding 29-month-old children's behaviour, children in the extended night waking group had highest scores on externalizing and internalizing behaviours. Girls had higher scores on shyness/inhibition and boys had higher scores on aggression/hyperactivity.

CONCLUSION

Mothers' and fathers' parenting cognitions and behaviours are affected by 29-month-old children's night waking patterns and night waking patterns are associated with children's behavioural problems.