Abstract

Healthy sleep habits and resulting sleep quality and quantity are critical to children’s growth and development. Children who live in economically stressed urban environments are especially vulnerable to unhealthy sleep habits and their negative consequences, but families’ perceptions about sleep and sleep habits and preferences regarding support for promoting healthy sleep habits are not known, and interventions are urgently needed to promote healthy sleep habits and address individual, family, cultural, and social factors that contribute to poor sleep habits and sleep difficulty among young children who live in economically stressed urban environments.

This ongoing study, guided by the Social Ecological Model employs a community-engaged (CEnR) approach to obtain foundational information to support development of a sleep promotion program for children between 6 and 36 months of age. The study addresses the following specific aims: (1) Examine parents’ knowledge and perceptions about their 6–36-month-old children’s sleep and objective characteristics of sleep, including (1a) self-reported and actigraph-recorded characteristics of sleep, sleep habits, and difficulty; (1b) the contributions of sleep habits and individual, family, community, cultural/social, and health-related factors to sleep characteristics and sleep difficulty; (1c) consequences of sleep difficulty; (1d) successful and unsuccessful strategies used to promote children’s sleep and sleep habits; (1e) preferences regarding sleep promotion interventions for their children; and (1f) perceptions of the optimal timing to begin sleep promotion intervention; (2) Examine pediatric primary care providers’ perceptions about (2a) the importance of sleep and sleep habits for 6–36-month-old children; (2b) factors that contribute to sleep habits and sleep difficulty; (2c) successful and unsuccessful approaches to promote healthy sleep habits, adequate duration, and good quality sleep and assessment and management of sleep difficulty in young children within the context of their families; and (2d) barriers, facilitators, and preferences regarding sleep-promoting interventions for families with young children; (3) Collaborate with families and providers to use the information obtained in Aims 1 and 2 to develop and refine a feasible, relevant, and acceptable sleep promotion program, including procedures, protocols, patient materials, intervention fidelity plans, and delivery methods.

We use CEnR and a convergent mixed methods approach to fully engage community stakeholders (parents, child care providers, pediatric health care providers) to develop a sleep promotion intervention. We expect that the results will lead to a future randomized controlled trial (RCT) that will examine the sustained effects of a community engaged sleep promotion program on sleep habits, sleep, and sleep-related outcomes among young children who live in economically stressed urban environments. Our long-term goal is to disseminate and translate an efficacious sleep promotion intervention into community settings.

In this presentation Drs. Redeker and Sadler discuss our progress and future plans.

Biographies

Nancy Schmeider Redeker, Ph.D., RN, FAHA, FAAN
Beatrice Renfield Term Professor of Nursing
Yale School of Nursing

Dr. Redeker teaches in the Ph.D. Program in Nursing at the Yale School of Nursing . Dr. Redeker’s sustained program of research, conducted over more than 25 years, addresses the role of sleep and sleep disorders among patients with acute and chronic conditions and the effects of behavioral sleep promotion interventions for clinical and community populations. Dr. Redeker is Director of the NIH-funded Yale Center for Sleep Disturbance in Acute & Chronic Conditions and the Yale School of Nursing Biobehavioral Laboratory.

Lois S. Sadler, Ph.D., RN, FAAN
Professor and Yale Child Study Center Director
Yale School of Nursing

Lois S. Sadler is a Professor at the Yale School of Nursing, where she teaches master’s and doctoral nursing students in the areas of family studies, child development, pediatric health promotion, research, research ethics and adolescent health. Dr. Sadler’s research interests include the evaluation of specialized support programs for at-risk young parents and their children. Her publications and presentations are in the area of adolescent primary health care issues, community-engaged research, high-risk families, adolescent parenthood, and home visiting. In 2014, the home visiting program, Minding the Baby®, developed and tested with colleagues from the Yale Child Study Center was designated by the Department of Health and Human Services as an evidence-based home visiting model, one of only 17 models nationwide.