How you help a child go to sleep is related to their behavioral development, finds new study

Medical Xpress / Frontiers in Psychology ^ | Nov. 23, 2022 | Christie Pham et al

[ConservativeMind]

Researchers examined parental methods to help toddlers sleep across 14 cultures and found that these methods are related to the development of a child's temperament.

Pham studied the effect of different parental sleep-supporting techniques on child temperament across 14 cultures. They hypothesized that passive ways of helping a child fall asleep (e.g., cuddling, singing, and reading), but not active methods (e.g., walking, car rides, and playing), would be positively related to a child's temperament.

Child temperament is defined as the way children regulate their behavior and handle their emotions. Researchers define temperament by three overarching factors:

Surgency (SUR), which reflects positive affect such as smiling and laughter, approach tendencies, activity, and enthusiasm.

Negative Emotionality (NE), which captures overall distress proneness, including in situations eliciting fear, anger, sadness, and discomfort.

Effortful Control (EC), involving attention-based regulatory skills and enjoyment of calm activities.

Each of the factors independently contributes to predicting behavioral, achievement, and interpersonal outcomes, such as behavior problems, social competence, and academic performance.

"Our study shows that a parent's sleep-supporting techniques are substantially associated with their child's temperament," said Pham. "For example, countries with greater reliance on passive strategies had toddlers with higher sociability scores (higher SUR)."

On the other hand, fussy or difficult temperament (higher NE) was significantly correlated with active sleep techniques.

Overall, passive sleep-supporting techniques were associated with lower NE and higher SUR at the culture level and higher EC at the individual level. Active sleep-supporting techniques were associated with higher NE at an individual level only.

Rank-ordering the extent to which a culture's sample endorsed using passive techniques, the results show that the U.S., Finland, and Netherlands top the list. In contrast, rank-ordering for active techniques, the researchers find that Romania, Spain, and Chile top the list.

[Mears]

I had 5 and I agree …..rraised the same way but all different .

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[HartleyMBaldwin]

For some reason I’m thinking of a bit from an H. Allen Smith book in which he refers to a song that his father would sing to the children just before slapping them to sleep.

[Vaduz]

If they fight that use NyQuil