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The current study examined the network of relationships among toddlers’ quality of sleep and emotion regulation, parental bedtime practices and involvement, parental self-perceived social support and stress, integrating a novel combination of psychosocial dimensions into a predictive model of quality of sleep and parental stress in a sample of 80 families with 2–3-year-old children. The results indicated that infants’ emotion regulation, as well as proximal context variables, considering both maternal and paternal psychosocial functioning predicted variance in parental levels of stress. Furthermore, the findings showed that the number of child’s night awakenings reported by mothersand thetimerequested bytoddlersto fallasleep, were significantly related to parental distress levels as referred by both parents.

The aim of this study was to investigate the prospective relations between parental psychosocial functioning and toddlers' sleep consolidation. Investigators met with 85 families 3 times, when children were 15 months (Time 1 [T1]), 18 months (T2), and 2 years of age (T3). Mothers and fathers completed questionnaires pertaining to their parenting stress, marital satisfaction, and perceived social support at T1 or T2, and mothers completed child sleep diaries at T2 and T3. Results indicated that fathers' parenting stress and marital satisfaction, as well as mothers' perceived social support, were related in expected directions to children's subsequent sleep consolidation (T3), with or without controlling for prior sleep consolidation (T2). In addition, all these relations were moderated by family socioeconomic status (SES), such that links were stronger in lower SES homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although most infants consolidate their sleep habits during the first year of life, for many children, sleep is described as disrupted during toddlerhood. Along with individual child variables such as temperamental characteristics, parenting behaviors play a key role in determining children's sleep-wake patterns. The aims of the current study were to evaluate the relationship among toddlers' sleep quality, emotion regulation, bedtime routines, parental bedtime involvement, parental perceived social support and stress, and to integrate a novel combination of the aforementioned dimensions into predictive models of toddlers' sleep quality and parental stress., Methods: One hundred and sixty parents with 2-3-year-old children filled out the following self-report questionnaires: the Parent-Child Sleep Interaction Scale; the Emotion Regulation Checklist; the Social Provisions Scale; and an ad-hoc questionnaire to assess parental involvement in everyday and bedtime care for children. Three multiple regression analyses were conducted by regressing maternal and paternal parenting stress and infant's quality sleep onto the independent variables described above., Results: Toddlers' emotion regulation and parental psychosocial functioning were related to parental stress. Toddlers' night awakenings and the time required by toddlers to fall asleep were related to parental distress., Conclusions: The findings evidenced the bidirectional associations among the studied variables, highlighting the protective role of social support in reducing parenting stress and of paternal bedtime involvement in improving toddlers' sleep quality.