Grant: Operating Grant

Do parenting, child sleep and mental abilities interact to predict children's mental health status? Contrary to popular belief, psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, aggression and hyperactivity are common in children and often persist throughout childhood and into adolescence. When searching for the causes of children's psychological difficulties, researchers have often focused on parent-child relationships. We now know that while poor parent-child relations do contribute to the development of psychological problems in children, not all children exposed to non-optimal parenting develop psychological difficulties. This suggests that in addition to parenting, other factors influence children's mental health. In particular, children's biological and mental characteristics could make some children more vulnerable to the effects of low-quality relationships with their parents and at-risk for developing psychological problems, while others might be protected against such problems. This project focuses on two factors that might influence children's mental health in addition to parenting. First, the quality of children's sleep will be studied as an important aspect of children's biological functioning. Second, mental abilities that enable children to plan and establish future goals (called "executive functioning") will be studied. A group of 250 children who have been followed by our research group since birth will be invited to participate in the current project when they are in Grades 1 to 4. We will use tests and questionnaires to examine their relationship with their parents, the quality of their sleep and their executive functioning to determine how these factors interact with each other to determine mental health status. The results of this study will help us to better understand the development of psychological problems in childhood and how we might detect problems early in life so that they can be treated.