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Children's exposure to marital conflict and sleep problems are pivotal risk factors for myriad mental and physical health problems, yet scholars have only recently begun to investigate relations between these important domains of children's lives. This chapter extends the dialogue on family functioning, pediatric sleep, and child development research with the hope of highlighting how concurrent examinations of familial processes and children's sleep can illuminate children's adaptation and maladaptation. The main objective is to review the small but growing body of literature that establishes a connection between children's exposure to their parents' marital conflict and disruptions in their sleep. While doing so, it presents conceptual considerations that may be useful as researchers begin to address the question, “Why does marital conflict relate to children's sleep?”.

This chapter is organized around a conceptual model which contends that children's sleep is influenced by parental sleep-related cognitions and behaviors as well as the general context of the parent–child relationship. It begins by discussing parental sleep-related cognitions and behaviors in terms of the balance between parental sensitivity and the need to facilitate children's independent sleep competence. It then discusses the parent–child relationship as a context that may promote or undermine children's psychological comfort (e.g., level of anxiety at night), and thereby establish better or poorer conditions for children's sleep. It considers the reciprocal nature of the connection between parenting and children's sleep, emphasizing the effects of children's sleep on parents' sleep and their capacity to regulate emotions and behaviors that support positive parent–child interactions and relationships. Finally, directions for future research that would accelerate understanding of the interface between parenting and children's sleep are discussed.

This chapter focuses on the consequences of sleep deficits for children between one and ten years of age. Research on adolescents and adults strongly suggests that sleep plays important roles in learning and behavior. Recent reviews suggest that less than optimal nighttime sleep is associated with less than optimal functioning during the day, particularly with respect to adults' learning, adolescents' academic performance, and attention deficit disorders in children. Likewise, sleep disordered breathing has been linked with cognitive functioning and emotions and behavior problems in children between the ages of four and sixteen years.

Sleep problems across development are common, from infancy through adolescence. Further, the consequences of disrupted or insufficient sleep are numerous, impacting growth, learning, development, and mood. However, youth do not live in isolation, but rather are a part of a family system that is dynamic and interactive. One consequence of sleep problems in youth that has only recently received increasing attention is how sleep disorders or sleep disruptions in youth affect parent sleep and daytime functioning. This chapter reviews the existing literature in this area. It begins with a review of the relationship between sleep in children and their parents using a developmental framework from pregnancy through adolescence. It then considers the complex relationship between a child's illness or developmental disorder, the child's sleep, and both parental sleep and daytime functioning. Throughout, the chapter highlights how the treatment of sleep problems in children is essential, resulting in the improvement of not only the child's sleep but also parental sleep and daytime functioning.

The large majority of studies examining children's sleep in the context of parental psychopathology are concerned with the specific measures of sleep, such as bedtime, rise time, efficiency, or duration (as opposed to more functional consequences of sleep, such as emotional lability or poor performance). Furthermore, the existing literature is dominated by questionnaire and activity-based measures of sleep. This chapter begins with the largest portion of this literature—sleep characteristics during infancy and early childhood. Following this are shorter sections on middle childhood and adolescence. These descriptions of the empirical literature is followed by integrative material on methodologic issues (such as sleep assessment strategies, informant confounds, and psychopathology assessment), as well as theoretical integration of the available literature.

This chapter reviews the available evidence indicating that traumatized children are hypervigilant not only during the day but also during the night, resulting in disrupted sleep. Most of the extant literature to date has focused on trauma resulting from emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, or witnessing domestic violence, torture, war, or terrorist attacks. Research on traumatized children includes mostly subjective and descriptive investigations of sleep in children and adolescent samples, with a paucity of studies that use objective sleep methods. Studies that have utilized subjective sleep assessments are first reviewed, followed by investigations that have included objective evaluation of sleep. The chapter concludes with an examination of the limited data on pertinent interventions with children and adolescents.

This chapter describes recent approaches to conceptualizing the ecology of disadvantage in relation to children's sleep. It treats sleep as an indicator and outcome of environmental adversity. It begins with a discussion of conceptual issues and stress models that frame interpretation of class and poverty effects. The next section briefly considers the strengths and weaknesses of low socioeconomic status (SES) as a representation of the ecology of disadvantage. The sections that follow discuss income poverty and representations of poverty-related stressors.