Parental social capital and children's sleep disturbances

Objectives: Sleep plays a critical role in the health and well-being of children. Individual and household factors, including parent's social connections, may impact children's sleep. Our study assessed the association between children's sleep disturbances and parent's social capital in a sample of Canadian households.

Design: Cross-sectional, observational study.

Settings and participants: Data came from 339 children and their parents who completed a telephone and follow-up survey in 2013 as part of the Canada Brain-to-Society study. Participants were parents (73.1% female) with children aged 6 to 12years residing in Montreal, Canada.

Measurements: Parental social capital was assessed using a position generator, and children's sleep disturbances were measured with the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire. Other household demographic and socioeconomic characteristics were measured, including parental and child age and sex, foreign-born status, and income. Linear regression was used to examine the association between parental social capital and children's sleep disturbances while controlling for possible confounders.

Results: Parental social capital was negatively associated with children's sleep disturbances (β=-0.02, SE=0.01, P<.05), when controlling for demographic factors (sex of parent, household income, foreign-born status, parent's age, sex and age of child, suggesting that children of parents with higher social capital had fewer sleep disturbances.

Conclusions: Parents with higher social capital tended to have children with few total sleep disturbances than did parents with lower social capital. Parental social capital may be a potentially modifiable aspect of the home environment that has implications for children's health.