Stress, Sleep, and Maternal Executive Function, Responsiveness, and Parenting

The proposed study will measure maternal sleep with the innovative and objective method of actigraphy bracelets to determine how sleep might affect mothers’ executive functioning, responsiveness, and parenting. Executive functioning involves complex cognitive processes, reflecting a parent’s working memory, impulse control, set shifting, and ability to inhibit a dominant response for a sub-dominant one (Bernier et al., 2013). Sleep deficits greatly impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is critical for executive functioning (Horne, 1993). Because sleep affects executive functioning and this higher level of cognitive processing may be critical for parenting, executive functioning might mediate the relationship between sleep and parenting, as illustrated in the theoretical model in Figure 1. Mothers with sleep deficits (active nights, variation across nights, and short duration) are expected to show less effective executive functioning, and, in turn, less responsiveness to their child during mother-child laboratory tasks. We expect that these mothers with less sleep and lower executive functioning will also report the use of more harsh parenting strategies.

An additional objective of this project is to determine the relationship between sleep and various stressors, including home chaos and stimulation, stressful life events, difficult children, and work-family conflict. It is posited that sleep may mediate the relationship between stress and negative parenting (see Figure 1). Finally, maternal temperament will be investigated as a potential moderator of the relationship between maternal stress, sleep, and functioning. The relationship between maternal sleep and these maternal outcomes is expecte...

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...imate of the individual time point effect of stress and sleep, these level one variables will be group mean centered.

Structural equation modeling with Mplus could also be used to look at latent factors across measurement methods for each variable. For instance, a latent factor of parenting may be formed using maternal self-report of parenting strategies from questionnaires, observer report of parent-child interactions from the home visit, and observer report from maternal responsiveness coding of the laboratory visit. Incorporating measures of home chaos, home stimulation, parenting daily hassles, stressful life events, and work-family conflict could also form a latent factor of stress. This would provide parsimonious analysis of overarching variables, such as parenting and stress, while still utilizing the rich data from a multi-method approach to measurement.