Temporal relationships between device-derived sedentary behavior, physical activity, and sleep in early childhood

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Christine W St Laurent1, Chloe Andre1, Jennifer F Holmes1

  • 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA.

Sleep
|January 13, 2022
PubMed

Insights

Higher sleep efficiency in children positively influences next-day physical activity and reduces sedentary behavior. Understanding these relationships is key for establishing healthy daily routines in early childhood.

Area of Science:

  • Pediatric Sleep Science
  • Childhood Behavior Analysis
  • Chronobiology

Background:

  • Establishing healthy sleep and physical activity patterns in early childhood is crucial as these behaviors are largely caregiver-determined.
  • Understanding the temporal links between daytime behaviors and overnight sleep is essential for optimizing children's daily routines.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the within- and between-person temporal associations between daytime wake behaviors (sedentary behavior and physical activity) and overnight sleep in young children.
  • To identify how daily variations in physical activity and sleep influence subsequent behaviors in early childhood.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized wrist-worn actigraphy for daily, repeated measures of wake behavior and overnight sleep in 240 children (mean age 50.8 months) over 9 days/nights.
  • Employed multilevel models with lagged effects to analyze temporal associations, adjusting for nap duration, age, sex, and socioeconomic status.

Main Results:

  • Higher sleep efficiency (SE) was associated with less subsequent sedentary behavior (SB) and more moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and total physical activity (PA) the following day.
  • Between-person analyses showed negative associations between MVPA and total PA with sleep efficiency, and positive associations between sleep duration and light PA.

Conclusions:

  • While most daily behaviors were not strongly influenced by prior day's activity or sleep, higher sleep efficiency demonstrated a beneficial impact on subsequent wake behaviors.
  • Future research should focus on within-person associations and explore lagged effects beyond one day to fully understand these dynamic relationships in young children.
Abstract

Keywords:
early childhoodintensive longitudinalphysical activitysedentary behaviorsleeptemporal

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