Abstract Introduction Postpartum sleep disturbances are associated with disrupted parenting. While prior studies have linked parent sleep to parenting behavior using composite ratings during parent-infant play, such assessments lack fine-grained information on potentially modifiable behaviors that may be impacted by poor sleep. In contrast, micro-level dyadic analyses quantify the contingency (timing) and content (focus) of parents’ moment-by-moment responses, which directly predict infant outcomes. The present ongoing study examines relations between parent sleep and these micro-level aspects of dyadic parenting behavior. Methods Seven female parents (age=34.6±3.6 years) and the 5-6-month-old infants they gave birth to (age=6.2±0.5 months; 1F) completed a 15-minute video-recorded free-play session following 5-8 nights of actigraph-monitored sleep at home. Researchers scored 6 minutes (5-7, 9-11, and 13-15) of each session offline, coding infants’ visual attention and non-cry vocalizations and parents’ verbal/manual behaviors. Parent contingency was calculated as the percentage of infant vocalizations receiving a parent response within 2sec of offset. Parent response content was quantified as the percentage of contingent responses that were jointly focused (i.e., engaged infants’ object of attention). Actigraph-estimated parent sleep variables included mean total sleep time, efficiency (total sleep time/sleep period time %), and fragmentation (#wakeups/100-minutes sleep). Partial correlations and regressions controlling for infants’ number of vocalizations (mean=30±23, range 7-63) assessed the relations between each sleep variable and parents’ contingency and response content. Results Parents’ mean sleep efficiency ranged from 74.9%-97.0% (mean=86.2%±6.6%), with 42.9% of parents sleeping a mean of 7h/night. Based on 6 dyads with scorable video, parent contingency ranged from 25.6%-85.7% (mean=50.4%±25.7%), and 28.2%±19.6% of parents’ responses were jointly focused (range=0%-54.6%). Critically, parents with higher sleep efficiency exhibited significantly more jointly-focused responses (r=.987, p=.002). No other linear relations were significant (all ps.05), though sleep efficiency also showed a nonlinear relation with parents’ overall contingency levels that must be further explored (βquadratic-standardized=8.76, t=8.29, p=.014). Conclusion In this preliminary sample, sleep was associated with the content of micro-level parental responses during free-play: parents with higher sleep efficiency had more jointly-focused contingent responses. Data collection is ongoing. Future analyses will assess how concordance between parents’ and infants’ sleep patterns may relate to parent dyadic behavior. Support (if any) AASMF 334-BS-24; P20GM139743; R01HD103665
Mason et al. (Fri,) studied this question.