Anthony B Cifre, Christopher J Budnick, Johanna Bick, Eleanor L McGlinchey, Carol H Ripple, Amy R Wolfson, Candice A Alfano
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Objectives: Sleep disruption is prevalent among children placed in foster care, elevating risk for a range of deleterious outcomes. Theoretically, achieving permanency via adoption may have a positive influence on children's sleep via the presence of various factors, but little is known about the sleep health of children adopted from foster care, including predictors and moderators of sleep health.
Method: The current study included 226 parents who adopted a child from foster care in the U.S. (aged 4-11 years) within the past two years and a propensity score matched sample of 379 caregivers of children currently in foster care. Both samples completed online questionnaires about their child's sleep, physical, and mental health.
Results: Comparatively, children in foster care experienced more nightmares, night terrors, moving to someone else's' bed during the night, and worse overall sleep quality, whereas adopted children were reported to experience significantly more nighttime awakenings. In the adopted sample, a greater number of prior foster placements unexpectedly predicted lower total sleep disturbance scores, but this relationship was moderated by parent-child interactions around sleep. In general, greater parental involvement in children's sleep was associated with lower levels of child sleep disturbance.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that while specific sleep problems might remit after children in foster care achieve permanence, nighttime sleep fragmentation often persists. Parent-child interactions surrounding sleep may be pivotal in improving sleep health in this population.
期刊介绍:
Behavioral Sleep Medicine addresses behavioral dimensions of normal and abnormal sleep mechanisms and the prevention, assessment, and treatment of sleep disorders and associated behavioral and emotional problems. Standards for interventions acceptable to this journal are guided by established principles of behavior change. Intending to serve as the intellectual home for the application of behavioral/cognitive science to the study of normal and disordered sleep, the journal paints a broad stroke across the behavioral sleep medicine landscape. Its content includes scholarly investigation of such areas as normal sleep experience, insomnia, the relation of daytime functioning to sleep, parasomnias, circadian rhythm disorders, treatment adherence, pediatrics, and geriatrics. Multidisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. The journal’ domain encompasses human basic, applied, and clinical outcome research. Behavioral Sleep Medicine also embraces methodological diversity, spanning innovative case studies, quasi-experimentation, randomized trials, epidemiology, and critical reviews.