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Infant sleep and the quality of family life for first-time parents of three-month-old infants

Fathering, Wntr, 2008 by Lynn Loutzenhiser, Phillip R. Sevigny

While it is widely recognized that sleep patterns in early infancy can affect the quality of family life, studies have focused primarily on sleep problems that emerge in later infancy. Further, researchers have tended to conceptualize the quality of family life primarily in terms of the psychological functioning of the mother and have thus ignored the experiences of fathers. Grounded in a family systems framework, this study explores the relationship between nighttime infant sleep duration, infant negativity, psychological and relational functioning in first-time parents of three-month-old infants. Infant sleep duration was significantly associated with father's reports of parenting stress, family functioning and infant negativity. Infant sleep duration was related to fathers' psychological functioning with fathers whose infants slept for shorter periods reporting higher levels of distress than fathers whose infants slept for longer periods of time. Contrary to expectations, neither mothers' psychological functioning, nor mothers' or fathers' ratings of relational functioning were significantly associated with infant sleep duration. These results highlight the importance of studying the influences of normal infant behaviors on new parents and of expanding the study of early infant development beyond a focus on the mother-child dyad.

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Keywords: fathers, mothers, infant sleep, psychological functioning, family relationships

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One of the most commonly cited concerns of new parents is their infants' sleep behaviors (Ferber, 2006; Thiedke, 2001; Thome & Skuladottir, 2005a, 2005b; Wolfson, Lacks, & Futterman, 1992). While anecdotal evidence suggests this concern may reflect the negative associations between infant sleep and the quality of family life, these associations have received little empirical attention (Durand & Mindell, 1990; Thome & Skuladottir, 2005a). Moreover, in the few studies that have been conducted, researchers have focused primarily on associations between sleep problems in late infancy and maternal psychological functioning. This narrow focus is problematic for at least two reasons. First, parental complaints about their infants' sleep often occur during the first few months of infancy, and reflect experiences with normal, not abnormal, sleep behaviors (Ferber). Second, by focusing primarily on the relationship between infant sleep and maternal psychological functioning, researchers are ignoring not only the associations between infant sleep and the psychological functioning of fathers, but also its associations with other aspects of the family functioning, such as dyadic and family unit functioning. Researchers have indicated that the functioning of families is best understood from a family systems perspective, which takes into account not only functioning at the level of individual family members, including mothers and fathers, but also functioning at the level of family relationships (i.e., marital dyads, family-unit) (Barrows, 2004; Hayden et al., 1998). Thus, in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between infant sleep and the quality of family life, we need to expand our investigations to examine associations between normal infant sleep behaviors in early infancy and the quality of family life at different levels within the family system. In this study, we investigated the relationships between infant sleep, parental psychological functioning, and relational functioning in first-time parents of 3-month old infants.

Infant Sleep and Parental Psychological Functioning

During the first month of infancy, most infants awaken every 3-4 hours and require caregivers to settle them back to sleep (Middlemiss, 2004; Wolfson et al., 1992). These frequent night-wakings, which impact the duration of night sleep, tend to reduce in frequency during the first year (Goodlin-Jones & Anders, 2004). Researchers have found the longest period of infant sleep duration increases steadily from birth until around 3 months of age, when it levels out and tends to remain stable for the remainder of the first year (Burnham, Goodlin-Jones, Gaylor, & Anders, 2002). However, there remains a wide range of variability at the three-month age period, with the majority of non-clinical three-month-old infants sleeping anywhere from 5 to 9 hours during the night without waking. Despite the wide range of normal sleep duration at this age, patterns of sleep behavior do not come to be clinically recognized as sleep problems until the infant is at least six months old. As researchers interested in infant sleep and family life have understandably focused on families of infants with recognized sleep problems (Goodlin-Jones & Anders), studies have generally been done with infants six months old or older. Nevertheless, the specifics of a given infant's sleep behavior probably make a difference to that infant's parents. For example, it is likely that parents of an infant who is sleeping 5 hours or less at a time may view their infant's sleep as more problematic than the parents of an infant who is sleeping 9 hours or more at a time, despite that both 5 and 9 hours are considered to be in the normal range. The common recognition that a relative lack of night-time sleep during early infancy may be negatively associated with the quality of family life is reflected in one of the questions most frequently asked of parents of newborns, "Is your baby sleeping through the night yet?" Findings from large-scale epidemiological surveys also support this view. Approximately 15% of parents of 3-month-old infants report their infants' sleep as problematic (Thome & Skuladottir, 2005a), even though it is not clinically recognized as a sleep problem at this stage. Thus, given that this variation in normal infant development is of concern to some parents, extending the examination of infant sleep on the quality of family life to early infancy is warranted.

Infant sleep and the quality of family life for first-time parents of three-month-old infants

Fathering, Wntr, 2008 by Lynn Loutzenhiser, Phillip R. Sevigny

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