Ensure Safe Sleep, Physically and Emotionally

Bowlby’s ethologically-based attachment theory posited a biological rationale for our reliable fear and anxiety about being alone in the dark. Naturally this fear is heightened in our immobile and defenseless young children.

Current research prompts us to question the pervasive cultural pressure to distort our natural responses to these biological realities.

Three papers simply attempt to understand and describe the current state of “normal” child sleep patterns in different cultures and at different ages. One paper links melatonin to breastmilk, and another looks at father care and sleep patterns.

Breastfeeding May Improve Nocturnal Sleep and Reduce Infantile Colic: Potential Role of Breast Milk Melatonin

Engler, A. C., Hadash, A., Shehadeh, N., & Pillar, G. (2012). Breastfeeding may improve nocturnal sleep and reduce infantile colic: potential role of breast milk melatonin. European Journal of Pediatrics, 171(4), 729-732.

Exclusively breastfed infants had less colic and fussiness, and slept longer. Melatonin, which promotes sleep, available only in breastmilk, showed a clear relationship to infant sleep patterns.

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Sample

  • N: 94
  • Subject Ages: Infants ages 2 to 4 months
  • Location: Not available
  • SES: Not available
  • Eligibility: Not available
  • Additional:
    • Breastfeeding infants: Mean weight 5.36 kg; mean gestational age at birth of 39.2 weeks
    • Formula-fed infants: Mean weight 5.79 kg; mean gestational age at birth of 39.0 weeks

Hypotheses

  1. Maternal melatonin passes through milk to the infant, and as a result, the infant will have a better nocturnal sleep, earlier establishment of circadian rhythm and decreased incidents of infantile colic.
  2. Melatonin has a relaxing effect on the gastrointestinal system and has a hypnotic effect.

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

  • Irritability/potential infantile colic and sleep characteristics - questionnaire
  • Melatonin levels in breastmilk and formula - ELISA

Design—Descriptive

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Findings

  1. Exclusively breastfed infants had lower incidence of colic attacks, less severe levels of irritability and longer durations of sleep.
  2. The breastfed infants had more fragmented sleep, but the overall duration of wakefulness at night was similar in both groups.
  3. No melatonin was measured in formula. Melatonin showed a clear circadian curve in human milk.
  4. There was a significant difference in the weight of formula-fed versus breastfed babies, with breastfed babies being significantly lighter.

Limitations

  • Sample is convenience, not random, so possible selection bias.
  • Potential psychosocial bias, such as socioeconomic status, the family-unit composition, etc.
  • Data based on self-report

Childhood Sleep Duration and Associated Demographic Characteristics in an English Cohort

Blair, P. S., Humphreys, J. S., Gringras, P., Taheri, S., Scott, N., Emond, A., ... & Fleming, P. J. (2012). Childhood sleep duration and associated demographic characteristics in an English cohort. Sleep, 35(3), 353-360.

More research is needed to identify what is normal when it comes to child sleep. Some of what is known is that children need longer nighttime sleep until about 9 years old. By school age, most children sleep through the night, but children up to 3 1/2 years old continue to wake at least once. Low birth-weight and pre-term infants sleep more. Infants of younger mother sleep more. All infants sleep longer at night, wake multiple times at night, and sleep longer daytime naps than young children who mostly stop taking naps by 5 years old. Girls sleep longer than boys. Children with siblings sleep less.

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Sample

  • N: 8,500
  • Subject Ages: Not available
  • Location: England, County of Avon (total population 940,000)
  • SES: Not available
  • Eligibility: Children born in 1991 and 1992
  • Additional: Predominantly White population, urban and rural mix similar to the rest of the United Kingdom

Objective

  1. To examine sleep duration and patterns in a well-characterized, large, unselected cohort of children across early childhood.

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

  • Sleep duration - questionnaire

Design—Cohort, prospective longitudinal

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Findings

  1. Currently available data do not allow the identification of what constitutes “normal” sleep duration for children at different ages. We have shown, in an unselected birth cohort, striking interindividual and intraindividual variation that may result in mislabeling of children with potential sleep disorders when their sleep is within the normal range. Clinicians and parents will benefit from more accurate estimations of normal ranges of sleep duration and sleep awakening in relationship to family characteristics.
  2. There are specific demographic characteristics associated with sleep duration during childhood.
  3. Total sleep time decreased from an average of 13.2 hours at 6 months to 9.8 hours at 11 years.
  4. Nighttime sleep duration did not begin to decline until about 9 years.
  5. By school age, most children slept through the night, but about half of children between 18 and 42 months were reported by their parents to wake at least once. Ten percent of infants woke more than three times per night, which decreased over time.
  6. Average daytime sleep time at 6 months was 2.4 hours. This number was about 1.2 hours for those children who still took daytime naps, and only 2% of children took naps by age 5.
  7. Girls consistently slept five to ten minutes longer than boys.
  8. Low birthweight and pre-term infants slept longer.
  9. Sleep duration was longer for infants of younger mothers and shorter for those of older mothers.
  10. Children from lower SES families tended to go to bed later and rise later.
  11. Older children from mothers with lower education tended to sleep slightly longer.
  12. Children of non-White ethnicity slept less than White children, and their bedtimes were later.
  13. Children in families with many other children slept less.

Limitations

  • A limitation of most longitudinal studies conducted over several years is that missing data and loss to follow-up are more likely to occur in the most socioeconomically deprived groups. This study is no different, but its large size means that, even with different rates of loss to follow-up, there is sufficient power to investigate effects in small groups. The number of children in the study fell from 11,478 at 6 months to 7,043 at age 11. The children lost to follow-up over time were mostly from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families with more vulnerable infants.
  • Sleep duration at all time points was only available for 4,528 participants.
  • Parent reporting of children’s sleep tends to overestimate sleep duration.

Cross Cultural Differences in Toddler and Infant Sleep

Mindell, J. A., Sadeh, A., Wiegand, B., How, T. H., & Goh, D. Y. (2010). Cross-cultural differences in infant and toddler sleep. Sleep Medicine, 11(3), 274-280.

Child sleep problems are based more on culturally-influenced parental perceptions than actual biological reasons, and nighttime sleep issues tended to be perceived more problematic than daytime naps.

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Sample

  • N: 29,287
  • Subject Ages: Birth to 36 months
  • Location:
    • Predominantly Asian (P-A) countries and regions: China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
    • Predominantly Caucasian (P-C) countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States
  • SES: Variable
  • Eligibility: Parents who completed the questionnaire
  • Additional:
    • Urban samples
    • 48.1% boys
    • 89.7% mothers
    • 75.7% parents were between 25 and 35 years old
    • 83.7% parents had some college education
    • 52.1% parents were employed full-time
    • There were significant differences between P-A and P-C for birth order, sex, age of respondent, education of respondent and employment status.

Objectives

  1. To characterize sleep patterns, sleep behaviors and sleep problems in a large sample of children ages birth to 36 months in multiple P-A and P-C countries/regions.
  2. To assess sleeping arrangements and parental perceptions of sleep problems in these young children.

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

  • Daytime and nighttime sleep patterns, sleep-related behaviors, sleeping arrangements (bed-sharing and room-sharing) and bedtime, child’s behavior during the last two weeks - Brief Infant Sleep Survey questionnaire expanded, Internet-based

Design—Cohort, cross-cultural

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Findings

  1. Statistically significant cross-cultural differences were found in sleep patterns and problems.
  2. Children in the predominantly Asian (P-A) countries were reported by their parents to sleep less, have later bedtimes, room-share, and be perceived as having more sleep problems than children in predominantly Caucasian (P-C) countries
  3. Parentally defined sleep problems are clearly a universal issue. Parents in all 17 countries/regions reported significant sleep issues. Surprisingly, though, some of the largest country/region-based differences were how sleep was perceived as a problem by parents, ranging from a low of 10.1% in Vietnam to 75.9% in China.
  4. Minimal differences were found for daytime sleep (naps), with all children in this study following the same maturational pattern in napping behaviors. These results indicate a strong biological contribution to daytime sleep, rather than what appears to be a stronger culturally based influence to nighttime sleep.

Limitations

  • Cohort has an above-average level of education and is primarily urban.
  • This Internet survey did not prevent a person from participating more than once and could not ensure whether the participant had a child.
  • Parents with concerns about a child’s sleep may have been more likely to participate.
  • Participants in Vietnam and Thailand completed the survey by paper and so may have responded differently or have had different characteristics than those who completed the survey on the Internet.
  • Parental reports of infant behavior are necessarily limited as they may be inaccurate. Terms such as “sleep problem” may differ across cultures.
  • This study is broad in its geographic scope and does not provide information about the vast differences that might exist among subcultures and different ethnicities in a given country or region.

Infant Sleep and Paternal Involvement in Infant Caregiving During the First 6 Months of Life

Tikotzky, L., Sadeh, A., & Glickman-Gavrieli, T. (2011). Infant sleep and paternal involvement in infant caregiving during the first 6 months of life. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 36(1), 36-46.

In solitary sleep arrangements, mothers were more involved in nighttime parenting than fathers, and breastfeeding was related to less father involvement. More father involvement early on predicted fewer night-wakings by 6 months.

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Sample

  • N: 56 families
  • Subject Ages: Children followed from birth to age 6 months
  • Location: Israel
  • SES: Upper-middle class
  • Eligibility: Not available
  • Additional:
    • 34 infant boys (61%)
    • Mean maternal age of 29.13 years (range 22–37) and average education was 16.15 years (range 12–22)
    • Mean paternal age of 31.3 (range 25–48) and average education was 16.03 years (range 12–22)
    • Mean number of rooms at home was 3.3 (range 2–6)
    • None of the mothers reported medical problems during delivery or following birth
    • None of the parents met the Israeli cutoff scores for psychopathology
    • Mean gestational age was 39.52 weeks and mean birth weight was 3.31 kg (range 2.3–4.2). All infants were healthy during the assessment period.
    • At the age of one month, all the infants were taken care of by their mother at home
    • At six months, 34% were completely home-reared with their mothers and 66% were in day care (babysitter or nursery)
    • At the age of 1 month, 93% of the infants were (fully or partially) nursed, whereas at the age of 6 months, 30.4% were still fully breastfeeding and 28.6% were partially breastfeeding

Hypotheses

  1. Mothers would be more involved in infant caregiving than fathers.
  2. The involvement of fathers in the infant caregiving would increase over the first six months of life.
  3. Higher involvement of fathers in overall and nighttime infant care would be associated with more consolidated sleep after controlling for breastfeeding.

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

  • Assessment of parental involvement in infant care - the Parental Involvement Questionnaire
  • Sleep assessment -
    • actigraphy
    • sleep diary
  • Feeding -
    • general scale (formula-fed, partially breastfed, exclusively breastfed)
    • Soothing Scale (five-point Likert scale for frequency of using breastfeeding to soothe at night)

Design—Longitudinal

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Findings

  1. Mothers were significantly more involved in putting the infant to sleep than fathers.
  2. Breastfeeding was related to more frequent night-wakings, later sleep onset and less paternal involvement at bedtime.
  3. Higher involvement of fathers at one month predicted a lower number of infant night-wakings at 6 months.
  4. Higher paternal involvement in infant child care at 1 and 6 months was associated with shorter total sleep time at 6 months.
  5. Higher paternal involvement in infant child care at 6 months was associated with later sleep onset.
  6. There were no significant correlations between paternal involvement at bedtime and infant sleep. 

Limitations

  • The parents in the study represented an upper-middle class socioeconomic status in Israel, limiting the generalization of these findings.
  • All of the participants adopted solitary sleep arrangements.

Normal Sleep Patterns in Infants and Children: A Systematic Review of Observational Studies

Galland, B. C., Taylor, B. J., Elder, D. E., & Herbison, P. (2012). Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: A systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 16(3), 213-222.

More research is needed to identify normal sleep patterns in breastfed versus bottle-fed infants, in toddlers, on weekdays versus weekends, and as related to gender and ethnic differences. What is known is that children sleep longer at night and experience fewer night-wakings and daytime naps as they develop.

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Sample

  • N: 34 articles
  • Search Method: An extensive literature search of five electronic databases was conducted: Ovid MEDLINE, Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, and PsycINFO. All databases were searched for relevant articles published from 1990 to 2010 in which the title, abstract or keywords included reference to sleep and infant (age 0 to 23 months), or preschool (age 2 to 5 years) or child (age 6 to 12 years), and diary or questionnaires or actigraphy. The search was limited to English-language articles. Titles and abstracts were examined to extract potentially relevant articles and subsequently examined in more depth for inclusion/exclusion criteria by the main author and the research assistant.
  • Inclusion Criteria: Studies were required to fulfill the following criteria: a) original article; b) prospective cohort design; c) non-clinic studies; d) participants aged 0 to 12 years; e) sample was well-described (e.g., number of subjects, gender, recruitment criteria, etc.); f) include one or more of the following variables of interest: sleep duration, sleep latency, number of night wakings, longest sleep period, number of daytime sleeps; g) data for variables of interest were presented numerically with a measure of central tendency and variance.
  • Exclusion Criteria: Studies were excluded if: a) case-control design was used; b) the work was published as a dissertation or abstract only; c) if more than one report from the same study was published, we included only the first publication with data meeting the inclusion/exclusion criteria.

Objective

  1. To provide a standard against which abnormal sleep patterns can be measured, to in turn inform policy and strategies for intervention and to contribute to and advance our knowledge regarding developmental patterns of sleep.

Design—Meta analysis

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Findings

  1. Sleep patterns show the following developmental trends for sleep: Duration decreases from 0 to 12 years, number of night-wakings decreases from 0 to 2 years, longest sleep period increases from 0 to 2 years, and number of daytime naps decreases up to age 2.
  2. Sleep duration is the most commonly reported sleep variable. It has a wide range in infancy with the greatest rate of change occurring within the first 6 months of life.
  3. Predominantly Asian countries report less sleep duration than non-Asian countries.
  4. A clear omission from nearly all the infant studies is a breakdown of breastfeeding or bottle-feeding, well known to influence sleep patterns.
  5. There are several aspects of sleep that have limited documentation: normal sleep patterns in the toddler age group, gender and ethnic differences, and weekday versus weekend differences across all age groups.
  6. Studies publishing information on sleep patterns should present numerical data with measures of central tendency and variability so data can be incorporated into meta-analysis.

Limitations

  • The findings of this review need to be validated against parental reports matched to objective measures of the same sleep variables.
  • More prospective, large-scale longitudinal studies, rather than cross-sectional studies, are required to provide richer sources of data to document developmental patterns of sleep.
  • Research around cultural practices influencing sleep development is needed to provide culture-specific data.
  • The gap in the literature around the toddler age group suggests this age needs to be targeted to better document normal sleep patterns before children’s daytime routine is changed to fit school schedules.
  • The significance of the lower and upper limits of our data as cut-offs for problematic sleep need to be assessed for clinical application.

Patterns of Developmental Change in Infants’ Nighttime Sleep Awakenings from 6 through 36 Months of Age

Weinraub, M., Bender, R. H., Friedman, S. L., Susman, E. J., Knoke, B., Bradley, R., ... & Williams, J. (2012). Patterns of Developmental Change in Infants’ Nighttime Sleep Awakenings from 6 through 36 Months of Age. Developmental Psychology, 48(6),1511-1528.

Infants with night-wakings were more likely to be boys, be breastfed, have a difficult temperament, come from a large family, have a depressed mother, be in a single-parent home, and/or attend fewer hours of non-parental child care; however, this tendency for more night-wakings tended to resolve by 18 months.

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Sample

  • N: 1,200
  • Subject Ages: 6, 15, 24 and 36 months
  • Location: United States, hospitals at 10 data collection sites
  • SES: 24% ethnic minority, 11% of mothers did not complete high school, 14% single mothers (groups not mutually exclusive)
  • Eligibility: Not available
  • Additional: The sample was not designed to be nationally representative. However, the sample was similar to families in the census tract records and the nation as a whole on key demographic variables (household income and ethnicity).

Objectives

  1. Estimate the developmental trajectories of children’s sleep awakenings.
  2. Identify important variables associated with the developmental trajectories by examining relations of the trajectories with temperament, breastfeeding experiences, attachment security, health problems during infancy, and familial and environmental risk factors.
  3. Examine individual differences in sleep awakenings at specific points across infancy.

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

  • Number of nights per week with sleep awakenings - standardized interview
  • Sleep problems - the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL 2-3; Achenbach, 1992)
  • Gender and birth weight - interview
  • Temperament - 39 items selected from the 55 items on the Infant Temperament Questionnaire (Medoff Cooper, Carey, & McDevitt, 1993)
  • Whether mother breastfeeds - mother report
  • Attachment quality - the Strange Situation
  • Child illnesses - mother report
  • Maternal depression - the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D; Radloff, 1977)
  • Maternal sensitivity - semi-structured, videotaped, coded interactions
  • Maternal health - mother report
  • Spouse/partner in the home - mother report
  • Poverty - mother report
  • Child care - mother report

Design—Correlational

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Findings

  1. The two groups of children identified in this study appear to represent meaningful and distinct longitudinal patterns with regard to the developmental course of sleep.
  2. Not only were the patterns of sleep awakenings empirically distinctive, but membership in the groups was predictable from child and family characteristics.
  3. On average, the children who were “becoming sleepers” (defined by more frequent night awakenings), compared with “sleepers” (defined by little evidence of elevated sleep awakenings at any point from 6 months to 3 years), were more likely to be male, be breastfed, have a more difficult temperament, come from a large family, have a depressed mother, have a mother without a spouse or partner and/or be in child care for fewer hours.
  4. Most of these differences resolved at 18 months.

Limitations

  • Reliance on maternal report
  • Infants with many perceived awakenings may be perceived as having difficult temperaments.
  • Restricted sample: All infants were healthy at birth, and there were no twins, low birth-weight or premature infants.
  • Correlational study

Ensure Safe Sleep, Physically and Emotionally Additional References

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Ball, H. L., & Volpe, L. E. (2012). SIDS risk reduction and infant sleep location: moving the discussion forward. Social Science & Medicine.

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