Abstract
Sleep disturbances in early childhood are associated with mood and anxiety disorders. Children also exhibit sleep disruptions, such as nighttime awakenings, nightmares, and difficulties falling asleep, in conjunction with adverse events and stress. Prior studies have examined independently the role of sleep on adaptive processing, as well as the effects of stress on sleep. However, how childhood sleep and children's adaptive behavior (i.e., coping strategies) bidirectionally interact is currently less known. Using a within-subjects design and actigraphy-measured sleep from 16 preschool-aged children (Mage = 56.4 months, SD = 10.8, range: 36–70 months), this study investigated how prior sleep patterns relate to children's coping during a potentially stressful event, the COVID-19 pandemic, and how prior coping skills may influence children's sleep during the pandemic. Children who woke earlier had greater negative expression both before and during the pandemic. During the pandemic, children slept longer and woke later on average compared to before the pandemic. Additionally, for children engaged in at-home learning, sleeping longer was associated with less negative expression. These findings highlight how sleep behaviors and coping strategies are related, and the stability of this relationship under stress.
Highlights
The ability to cope with stress is critical to human development
We examined how prolonged stress may influence young children’s coping strategies and sleep behavior, and how prior sleep and coping affect children’s sleep and coping during periods of stress
Sleep and coping strategies were considered at two timepoints: prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The ability to cope with stress is critical to human development. Coping has been defined as the effort to regulate one’s emotions, cognition, behavior, physiology, and environment in response to challenging experiences [1, 2]. While studies in children have reported longer sleep times after the pandemic onset relative to before the pandemic [18,19,20], the pandemic may have resulted in reduced sleep quality and quantity in children [21,22,23] and naps may be less frequent and shorter [19, 20] It is unclear how the effects of sleep and coping may be bidirectionally associated in the context of ongoing stress in young children, considering that coping processes have been suggested to be regulated by situationrelated phenomena [e.g., situations that contribute to prolonged and increased stress such as diagnosis of a disease; [24]]. Understanding these relations will better elucidate how childhood sleep patterns may serve as a marker of coping ability in the face of stressful circumstances
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