Family Stressors and Sleep Problems During Adolescence: Evidence from the ALSPAC Cohort

Much research on risk factors of poor sleep in adolescence has focussed on stressful life events, but without explicitly investigating the role of family-wide (rather than personal) events. We carried out this study to explore the role of stressful family-wide events in sleep problems in adolescence in the general population.

Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), we investigated the role of recent family-wide stressors (at ages 12-16 years) in sleep problems (at age 17 years), while controlling for previous exposure to personal and family-wide stressors and other confounders (N = 4,561). Our list of recent family-wide stressors included not only major and rare adversities (such as death of a parent) but also relatively common events (such as death of a family pet) and normative transitions (such as birth of a sibling).

Our results showed a small but significant relation between number of recent family-wide stressors and adolescent sleep problems (b = 0.06, 95% CI: 0.04-0.09). This association was robust to confounder adjustment and similar for males and females.

Our findings suggest that interventions aiming to protect or improve the sleep of adolescents could target those experiencing a large number of recent family events even if these events were relatively minor.