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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 are remarkably common in children of all ages, with 20–40% of children affected. This chapter discusses behaviorally based sleep problems in infants, children, and adolescents, as well as their treatment. Behavioral sleep problems include such issues as bedtime resistance, problematic night wakings, nighttime fears, and insufficient sleep. The chapter is organized by developmental age groups. For each age group discussed, it presents normative data on sleep habits, developmental issues, common sleep problems, and age-appropriate treatments, with family considerations discussed.

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?”.

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.

This chapter discusses the myriad of factors that influence developmental changes in sleep timing and quantity for ten to fifteen-year-old, early adolescents. It begins by outlining how sleep duration, patterns, and circadian timing change over the course of early adolescence. Second, it presents data indicating that early adolescents today have insufficient and erratic sleep–wake patterns. Third, it discusses the collection of factors present in adolescents' microenvironment that challenge young adolescents' sleep, including school start times, television and computer use, and caffeine consumption. Finally, the chapter proposes some of the significant consequences, such as academic difficulties and struggles with depressed mood, that arise when sleep is compromised over the early adolescent years and offer recommendations for improvements.

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 explains how to apply the Certainty-Loss Framework (CLF) to stories involving self-locating belief and context-sensitivity. This formal modeling framework and its distinctive updating rules (Generalized Conditionalization and the Proper Expansion Principle) were defined and defended in previous chapters. Here the framework is used to model rational requirements in a number of stories, most importantly Adam Elga’s highly controversial Sleeping Beauty Problem. After analyzing solutions to that problem offered by Elga and by David Lewis, the chapter shows two different ways of constructing CLF models that refute Lewis’s solution (without invoking indifference principles or even Lewis’s Principal Principle). Objections to the CLF models are considered and rebutted.

This chapter discusses the results of our 10-year study of retirement and its alcohol-related consequences in order to describe how conditions and relationships in retirement influence drinking in retirement. The chapter argues and presents evidence to support the idea that it is not retirement per se that necessarily drives shifts in drinking patterns but conditions and experiences in retirement. More specifically, the research highlights several key risk factors in retirement of which older adults, employers, health care professionals, and policy makers should be mindful, including financial and marital strain, acute stressors, and physical pain. The research also points out that the impact of these factors on drinking is not necessarily straightforward. Rather, the effects may be limited to certain subgroups (such as men) and may operate through a variety of intermediary factors (such as sleep-related problems).

In this chapter, pediatric diseases are defined as “illnesses that affect a person for an extended period of time, often for life, and that require medical care attention above and beyond the normal requirements for a child or adolescent” (American Academy of Pediatrics 1993). The prevalence of such chronic illnesses has steadily increased over the past 20–30 years (Downs et al. 2001; Vincer et al. 2006; Marelli et al. 2007), with estimated rates ranging from below 1% to 44% depending on the definition, method, and sample included in the different studies (van der Lee et al. 2007). Several theoretical frameworks and models have been presented to explain how diagnosis-specific effects and generic factors across disorders affect cognition and behavior. The transactional stress and coping model (TSC) is one of the most cited theories on psychological adaption in children with a chronic illness, encompassing both specific and generic effects (Thompson and Gustafson 1996). Dennis (2000) has presented a similar model of factors affecting cognitive outcome in chronically ill children. The models describe how disease-related variables interact with child characteristics, developmental level, family resources, and peer relationships, and provide a useful framework to the present chapter. Several epidemiological and clinical studies have documented that children with pediatric diseases have an increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems (Lavigne and Faier-Routman 1992; Glazebrook et al. 2003; Hysing et al. 2007). Symptoms of internalizing and externalizing disorders are frequently found across the diseases but illness-specific manifestations also exist. Externalizing symptoms of hyperactivity and social problems are most often shown by children with neurological disorders (Rodenburg et al. 2005), while the rate of emotional problems has been reported to be especially high in children with asthma (Vila et al. 2003). Peer interaction and social functions are often affected in children with pediatric disorders. Investigations of the impact of social functioning is a growing research field in pediatric psychology, as part of a general trend in developmental psychology that focuses on close peer relationship as a moderator of nonoptimal functioning (Bukowski and Adams 2005; Burt et al. 2008).

I (V.G.) first got to know Channi at the inaugural Indian Biological Psychiatry meeting In Bombay over 20 years ago. I was working on monoamine oxidase at the time. It was my first trip to India and his first to Bombay for several decades. We spent much time talking together, and by the end of it, as well as visiting temples, the Gateway of India, and the Elephanta Caves. Channi had persuaded me to carry out research on maternal mood in the perinatal period, the effects on the child, and the underlying biological mechanisms. This I have been doing ever since. Thus for me, like many others, Channi changed the direction of my career. His infectious enthusiasm, and very wide range of interests, have directed and inspired world research in perinatal psychiatry. There is now considerable evidence from both human and animal studies that the children of stressed, anxious, or depressed mothers are more likely to experience a range of neurodevelopmental problems than the children of unstressed mothers. (Glover 2011; O’Donnell et al. 2009; Talge et al. 2007; Van den Bergh et al. 2007,). With animal studies it is much easier to establish that these associations are causal. Newborn rat pups of prenatally stressed mothers can be cross-fostered to non-stressed mothers on the first day after birth, with control pups of unstressed mothers cross-fostered also. This can establish that any differences in outcome are caused by stress in the prenatal period. Many such studies have shown that there are definite fetal programming effects of prenatal stress on behaviour, cognitive development, the hypothalamuspituitaryadrenal (HPA) axis, and brain structure and function of the offspring (e.g. Henry et al. 1994; Weinstock 2001, 2008; Afadlal et al. 2010). The nature of the effects can be affected by the timing of the exposure in gestation, the type of the stress, the strain of the animal, the age at which the offspring was tested, and the sex of the offspring (Weinstock 2008), The effects of prenatal stress on the offspring can often be mimicked by giving the stress hormone corticosterone, or a synthetic glucocorticoid, to the pregnant animal (Matthews 2000; Afadlal et al. 2009).

It is of great regret that although corresponding with him at the start of my research career, I never met Channi Kumar face to face. His work, however, as evidenced by this book, remains an important influence on our field. I share his belief in the ‘maternal brain as a model for investigating mental illness’ (Kumar 2001), and this conviction has underlined much of my research. In this chapter I will discuss the concept of postpartum psychosis (PP), explore what we know about the relationship of these episodes to other mood and psychotic disorders, and consider research strategies aimed at understanding the nature of the postpartum trigger. I will argue that the nosological confusion surrounding this condition has been unhelpful and that it is time, perhaps, to consider whether we should revive postpartum psychosis as a diagnostic concept. Episodes of mood disorder in relation to pregnancy and childbirth are very common. In our group we have recently examined the history of perinatal episodes in over 1,500 women with mood disorder who have participated in our genetic studies and find that approximately two thirds of parous women, with both bipolar and unipolar disorder, have experienced a significant mood episode in the perinatal period (Di Florio et al. 2013). PP refers to some of the most severe forms of postpartum psychiatric disorder. Although the boundaries of this condition are not easy to define, the core concept is the acute onset of a manic or affective psychosis in the immediate postpartum period. Depending on the definition employed, the incidence is approximately 1 in 1,000 deliveries (Jones et al. 2010). Women may go from being very well to severely ill within hours. Affective (mood) symptoms, both elation and depression, are prominent, as is a disturbance of consciousness marked by an apparent confusion, bewilderment, or perplexity. As the name suggests, psychotic phenomena occur, with delusions and hallucinations prominent. Some women with severe manic episodes, but who do not show psychotic symptoms, may receive the diagnosis, although it is also possible to reserve the label for those women with frank psychotic presentations.