Parental Report of Sleep Problems among Preschool Children and Their Predictors

Purpose:

Shortened child sleep duration has been identified as a ‘risk factor’ for poor child health outcomes like obesity. Identification of predictive factors for insufficient sleep may be helpful in developing interventions to change sleep health risk behaviors and for the purpose of preventing obesity in preschool populations. Preschool is the developmental stage of adopting health habits, thus it is an optimal time to promote healthy behaviors. Family is a health socialization unit and health habits aggregate within the family. Family is the major component of young children’s social and environmental contexts, and therefore parents have strong influence on children health behaviors. In addition, the effectiveness of parents’ socialization of their children will have an effect on their establishment, training, and enforcement of children’s health behavior. Hence, the overall objective for this study is to identify parental report of sleep problems among preschool children and their predictors.

Methods:

The design of the research is descriptive correlational. A purposive sampling was used to recruit 178 preschool children and their parents. Chinese version of the Children’s Sleep Habits Questionnaire (CSHQ) was used in identifying sleep problems. Measures assessing parents’ and children’ sleep hygiene, and parental sense of competence were included as potential predictors for sleep problems.

Results:

The mean sleep duration as reported by parents was M = 9.52 hours , SD = 1.03. The average bedtime was 9:31 PM. Co-sleeping was a common practice, with a prevalence of 96.6% (routine bed-sharing: 74.2%; room-sharing: 19.7%) in this sample of preschool children. In this study had 82.5% children’s total score were greater than a cut-off score of 41 and might have sleep problem. Mean scores of total child sleep problems and bedtime resistance were higher among children co-sleeping with their parents than room-sharing or sleeping alone. Better parental sense of competence is related to less child sleep problems (r=-.28). Correlation between parent sleep hygiene and their child’s sleep hygiene was .43 indicating parents’ sleep practices have moderate effect on their children’s sleep health behaviors. Twenty three percent of the variance in children’s sleep problems was explained by measures of child sleep hygiene and parental sense of competence.

Conclusion:

The results of this study support that parental behaviors have significant effects on child sleep behaviors. The results will be used to help health professionals to understand sleep problems and its impact among preschool children for the improvement of quality of care.