Mother-father agreement and one-year stability of children's sleep functioning

Sleep-related parenting self-efficacy and parent-reported sleep in young children: A dyadic analysis of parental actor and partner effects

OBJECTIVES

The role of positive cognitions, particularly domain-specific sleep-related parenting self-efficacy (SPSE), for young children's sleep has received limited attention so far. The present study investigates possible interdependencies between maternal/paternal SPSE and parent-reported sleep problems in infants and toddlers.

DESIGN AND SETTING

Mother-father dyads participated in this cross-sectional German study and filled out questionnaires.

PARTICIPANTS

One hundred thirty-one parental dyads with children aged between 2 and 47 months (M = 19.4; standard deviation = 10.6) participated in the study.

MEASUREMENTS

Parents answered a questionnaire about their own SPSE and the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire-Infant Version about their child's sleep. Paired sample t tests and correlations were used to investigate parental differences and agreement. An actor-partner interdependence model to examine the relationship between maternal/paternal SPSE and parent-reported child sleep problems was estimated, controlling for child age and co-sleeping.

RESULTS

The results reveal no differences between parents regarding their own SPSE and between mother- and father-reported child sleep problems. Mothers and fathers showed significant agreement regarding their children's sleep problems. For both parents, significant actor effects between SPSE and child sleep emerged, with higher SPSE being related to fewer child sleep problems. For fathers, also partner effects were significant with higher paternal SPSE being related to fewer child sleep problems in the maternal report.

CONCLUSION

This study underlines the importance of considering mothers' and fathers' nonindependence in dyadic data analysis. Parenting self-efficacy might play a specific role in the context of young children's sleep and could be used for early intervention and prevention programs.

Evidence Base Update on Assessing Sleep in Youth

BACKGROUND

Sleep is vital to youth well-being and when it becomes disturbed - whether due to environmental or individual factors - mental and physical health suffer. Sleep problems can also be a symptom of underlying mental health disorders. Assessing different components of sleep, including quality and hygiene, can be useful both for identifying mental health problems and for measuring changes in well-being over time. However, there are dozens of sleep-related measures for youth and it can be difficult to determine which to select for a specific research or clinical purpose. The goal of this review was to identify sleep-related measures for clinical and/or research use in youth mental health settings, and to update the evidence base on this topic.

METHOD

We generated a list of candidate measures based on other reviews and searched in PubMed and PsycINFO using the terms "sleep" AND (measure OR assessment OR questionnaire) AND (psychometric OR reliability OR validity). Search results were limited to studies about children and adolescents (aged 2-17) published in English. Additional criteria for inclusion were that there had to be at least three publications reporting on the measure psychometrics in community or mental health populations. Sleep measures meeting these criteria were evaluated using the criteria set by De Los Reyes and Langer (2018).

RESULTS

Twenty-six measures, across four domains of sleep - insomnia, sleep hygiene, sleepiness, sleep quality - met inclusion criteria. Each measure had at least adequate clinical utility. No measure(s) emerged as superior across psychometric domains.

CONCLUSION

Clinicians and researchers must evaluate sleep measures for each use case, as the intended purpose will dictate which measure is best. Future research is necessary to evaluate measure performance in transdiagnostic mental health populations, including youth with serious mental illness.

Agreement between mothers', fathers', and children's' ratings on health-related quality of life in children born with esophageal atresia - a German cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

Esophageal atresia (EA) is a rare congenital malformation, which is characterized by the discontinuity of the esophagus. We investigated the agreement between mothers', fathers', and children's' ratings on health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in children born with EA. We aimed to broaden the understanding of subjective experiences of HRQOL from different perspectives. We hypothesized that the agreement between mother and father ratings would be high, whereas the agreement between child and mother ratings as well as child and father ratings would show more substantial differences.

METHODS

We obtained data from 40 families (23 mother-father dyads of children aged 2-7 years and 17 mother-father-child triads of children and adolescents aged 8-18 years) with children born with EA, who were treated in two German hospitals. HRQOL was measured using the generic PedsQL™ questionnaires and the condition-specific EA-QOL© questionnaires. We calculated intraclass coefficients and performed one-way repeated measures ANOVAs to analyze differences for each domain as well as for the total scores.

RESULTS

Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) indicated a strong agreement (≥.80) between mother and father reports of children's HRQOL for both generic and condition-specific measurements. The ICCs for the generic HRQOL for mother/father-child-dyads revealed only fair to good agreement, whereas ICCs for condition-specific HRQOL showed high agreement for mother-child and father-child-agreement. Analyses of Covariance revealed differences in mother/father-child agreement in the generic domain School, both parents reporting lower HRQOL scores than the children themselves. Fathers reported significantly higher scores in the condition-specific domain Social than their children.

CONCLUSIONS

Results showed that mothers' and fathers' reports corresponded to each other. Nonetheless, these reports might not be interchangeably used because mother-child and father-child agreement showed differences. Children might know the best on how they feel, and parent proxy-report is recommended when reasons such as young age, illness, or cognitive impairments do not allow to ask the child. But parent-report - no matter if reported by mother or father - should only be an additional source to broaden the view on the child's health status and well-being. The current study contributes to a better understanding of the complex family relationships involved when parenting a child born with EA.