Neighborhood Socio-Economic Factors and Associations with Infant Sleep Health

ABSTRACT

Background: Sleep health is important for development and improves overall health. There are large socioeconomic gradients in sleep health, from childhood through adulthood. Recent findings suggest that children from neighborhoods with poorer socioeconomic conditions have more sleep problems. The current study aimed to investigate the associations between neighborhood factors and infant sleep health.

Participants and Methods

Secondary data analysis using Multilevel Modeling (MLM) was conducted for a subsample of 2445 women from the All our Families longitudinal cohort study, for whom early pregnancy neighborhood data could be geocoded. The Vancouver Area Neighborhood Deprivation Index (VANDIX) was calculated using census data to assess neighborhood SES. Neighborhood disorder was measured using community crime reports from police services. Mothers rated the perceived safety of their neighborhood and reported on their infants’ nighttime sleep consolidation, awakenings, and onset latency at 12 months postpartum.

Results

MLM indicated that neighborhood disorder and maternal perceptions of unsafety predicted less consolidated sleep after accounting for individual and family-level factors including maternal ethnicity, household income, breastfeeding duration, and co-sleeping. Neighborhood deprivation was indirectly related to less consolidated sleep among 12-month-old infants through more reports of disorder and maternal perceptions of less safety.

Conclusions

Consistent with the socio-ecological model of sleep, neighborhood-level, family, and individual factors influence infant sleep health. Policy efforts to increase neighborhood safety and public health initiatives to increase awareness of the importance of sleep could help improve infant sleep health.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the All Our Families study team as well as the participants and their families. We would also like to thank Peter Peller, Librarian in Spatial & Numeric Data Services at the Taylor Family Digital Library, for assistance with geocoding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the generous donors of the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation, the Canadian Child Health Clinician Scientist Program (CCHCSP), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) under Grant [430-2016-00469].