US fathers' reports of bonding, infant temperament and psychosocial stress based on family sleep arrangements

Sources of attitudes towards parent-child co-sleeping and their effects: A systematic scoping review

Parent-child co-sleeping is a common practice in many cultures, although in Western countries, families who engage in parent-child co-sleeping can encounter attitudes about co-sleeping that feel critical from the people around them, as it is not commonly accepted and often stigmatized. This systematic scoping review examined and synthesized the available literature on the attitudes about parent-child co-sleeping that people encounter, their origins, and their effect on parents' own attitudes and behaviors. A total of 9796 abstracts were screened, and 33 studies were included. While the scope of the literature on this topic was narrow, this review demonstrated that parents/caregivers mostly encounter encouraging attitudes about co-sleeping from their extended family members and within their culture and discouraging attitudes from healthcare professionals. Findings suggest that encouraging attitudes enhance the likelihood of parents engaging and continuing with co-sleeping behavior, while discouraging attitudes can lead to the avoidance of parents discussing sleep with their healthcare professionals and can cause conflicts with other family members, including partners. Based on these findings, we conclude that further research is needed in several areas related to co-sleeping in Western culture, most specifically in how external attitudes influence the decision to co-sleep, as well as other behaviors and cognitions such as engagement with healthcare professionals, family satisfaction, parental self-efficacy, and overall mental health.

Links between household and family social dynamics with sleep profiles among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin

Given the contributions of sleep to a range of health outcomes, there is substantial interest in ecological and environmental factors, including psychosocial contexts, that shape variation in sleep between individuals and populations. However, the links between social dynamics and sleep are not well-characterized beyond Euro-American settings, representing a gap in knowledge regarding the way that local socio-ecological conditions interrelate with sleep profiles across diverse settings. Here, we focused on data from a subsistence-level society in Republic of the Congo to test for links between the household/family social environment and sleep measures. Specifically, we used actigraphy-derived sleep data (N = 49; 318 nights) from two community locations (a village and rainforest camp) among BaYaka foragers, who are members of a remote, non-industrialized subsistence society in the Congo Basin. We drew on social dynamics that have been previously linked to sleep variation in Euro-American contexts, including: household crowding, same surface cosleeping, and marital conflict. We examined the following sleep measures: total sleep time (TST), total 24-h sleep time (TTST), and sleep quality (fragmentation). BaYaka adults had shorter and lower quality sleep when their shared sleeping space was more crowded. In the village, parents with breastfeeding-aged infants had longer TTST and higher quality sleep than adults without infants, contrasting with results from other cultural contexts. Based on peer rankings of marital conflict, husbands showed longer and higher quality sleep in less conflicted marriages. Women showed the opposite pattern. These counter-intuitive findings for women may reflect the limitations of the measurement for wives' marital experiences. In total, these results point to the importance of considering local socio-ecological conditions to sleep profiles and underscore the need for expanded study of sleep and health outcomes in settings where shared sleep in constrained space is routine practice.