Parents With Sleep Problems Think Their Children Have Them too.

'If you tell your child’s pediatrician that your child is having trouble sleeping, she might respond by asking you how well you sleep yourself.

A team of Finnish researchers found that parents with poor sleep quality tended to report more sleep-related difficulties in their children than parents who slept well. But when the researchers looked at an objective monitor of the children’s sleep, using a bracelet similar to a commercial fitness tracker that monitored movement acceleration, a measure of sleep quality, they found that the parents were often reporting sleep problems in their children that didn’t seem to be there.

“The only thing that was associated with sleeping problems, as reported by the parents, was their own reported sleeping problems,” said Marko Elovainio, a professor of psychology at the University of Helsinki and one of the authors of the study, which was published this month in the journal Pediatrics.

The study was relatively small, involving 100 families with children aged 2 to 6. But the findings suggest that parents’ report of sleep problems in their children are influenced by their own attitudes and behaviors surrounding sleep.'>>>

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/parents-with-sleep-problems-think-their-children-have-them-too/?