Daily associations between time-use and sleep onset timing in children: A multilevel compositional data analysis

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Sleep Science
• Behavioral Pediatrics
• Chronobiology

Background:

• Childhood sleep onset is influenced by daily activities.
• Understanding pre-sleep behaviors is crucial for optimizing sleep patterns in children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the association between time-use behaviors in the four hours preceding sleep and children's sleep onset time.
• To differentiate between between-person and within-person effects of pre-sleep activities on sleep timing.

Main Methods:

• Utilized time-use diaries from 3,438 children (aged 2-4) over 13,748 days.
• Categorized pre-sleep activities into screen time, physical activity, leisure, and routines.
• Employed multilevel Bayesian compositional data analysis to estimate associations.

Main Results:

• Substituting 15 minutes of screen time with physical activity before bed was linked to earlier sleep onset (7-8 minutes).
• Higher physical activity was associated with earlier sleep onset at the within-person level for both younger and older children.
• Routine behaviors showed mixed associations with sleep onset, promoting later sleep in younger children and earlier sleep in older children at different levels of analysis.

Conclusions:

• Pre-sleep time-use behaviors significantly impact both habitual and daily variations in children's sleep onset.
• Modifying evening routines, particularly reducing screen time and increasing physical activity, can be a strategy to improve sleep timing in children.