When the children do not sleep: the association with paternal mental health

Background: The relationship between children’s sleep and paternal mental health has been neglected in the literature. This is in spite of robust relationships being observed in mothers, and despite increasing involvement of fathers in childcare. Aims: The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between children’s sleep and fathers’ mental health and childcare involvement. Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, 308 dyads of fathers and children were recruited. Fathers completed measures of their children’s sleep, and reported on their own sleep, mental health and involvement in childcare. Initially these items served as correlation variables and in a subsequent analytic step they were introduced in a network of partial correlations together with further sleep and demographic information, controlled by an extended Bayesian information criterion. Results: Initially, significant positive correlations were retrieved between children’s sleep quality and paternal depression, stress and anxiety, but not with fathers’ involvement. In the networks, children’s sleep quality and duration were found to be related to parental availability and involvement respectively, whereas paternal depression was only related to current sleep problems experienced by the fathers. These effects prevailed even after excluding fathers and children with a mental and/or physical health diagnoses. Conclusions: Our findings highlight the importance of including fathers in paediatric sleep research, and the need to incorporate more sophisticated analyses, such as network modelling, to understand the nuanced dynamics of family functioning and its association with children’s sleep.