Neighborhood context and sleep in early childhood

About This Grant

Children with poor sleep health are at increased risk for mental health problems, substance use, underachievement and cardiometabolic disease. There are well-documented disparities in sleep health across the lifespan with observable differences in childhood. Social factors operating at the neighborhood level are increasingly recognized as critical factors to understanding and preventing a range of health disparities with their roots in childhood. Conceptual frameworks point to multiple facets of the neighborhood context (physical and social) that may influence sleep health in children; however, there is limited work examining factors at the neighborhood level and children’s sleep health in children of color living in urban neighborhoods. Such information is essential for advancing population-level approaches to promote sleep health in an important health disparity population. The goal of this study is to advance understanding of the role of neighborhood factors on sleep health disparities among first and second graders. This study merges an innovative and comprehensive publicly available data set on neighborhood factors with an investigator non publicly available longitudinal data set on nearly 600 children (primarily Black) in NYC. The publicly available data set is the Child Opportunity Index 3.0 (COI 3.0), a comprehensive database of the quality of neighborhood resources and conditions that matter for children’s healthy development. The investigator longitudinal dataset comes from a completed follow-up study of mental health and educational outcomes from a school-based, family centered preventive intervention implemented during Pre-K. The dataset includes parent-reported measures of multiple dimensions of child sleep health and a novel teacher-reported measure of child daytime sleepiness. The proposed study applies two approaches to consider a broad range of neighborhood factors as predictors of multiple dimensions of sleep health. The long-term goal is to translate study findings to: 1) optimize existing child and family-level sleep preventive interventions by considering neighborhood context and 2) develop structural interventions for sleep health promotion among children and families of color. Aim 1 examines individual neighborhood physical and social environment characteristics and their relative importance in predicting multiple dimensions of sleep health. Aim 2 creates typologies of neighborhoods across physical and social environment characteristics for all NYC neighborhoods and explores how neighborhood typology predicts sleep health. This project will advance understanding of the influence of neighborhood factors on sleep health disparities among a large sample of children of color (primarily Black) living in urban areas. Results will inform optimization of existing, and development of new, sleep health preventive interventions to promote population health in children of color living in urban neighborhoods.