Adolescents who live in a tense climate due to parental disagreement suffer more from sleep disorders in adulthood.
- Researchers have looked at the consequences of frequent parental arguments within a household.
- They then discovered that this climate of tension can permanently degrade adolescents’ sleep.
- At the age of 23, for example, these young people wake up more during the night.
While good quality sleep is essential for strong health, a new study demonstrates that couples who have very conflictual relationships can permanently disrupt their adolescents’ nights.
Conflicts between parents: what scale of measurement?
To reach this conclusion, theResearch author Ryan J. Kelly and colleagues sought to examine the relationship between witnessing conflict between one’s parents during adolescence (ages 16-18) and sleep quality in early adulthood (ages 23).
The data used in this analysis were collected between 2012 and 2020 from 245 adolescents. From 16 to 18 years old, participants reported on possible conflicts between their parents, their frequency and their intensity via the scale “Children’s Perception of Interparental Conflict Scale”. In addition, their sleep was assessed several times using actigraphs*.
When they moved on to the analyses, the researchers focused on three key measures of sleep: time spent asleep,sleep efficiency” (i.e., the percentage of time participants spent sleeping between falling asleep and waking up) and waking episodes (i.e., the number of times participants woke up and remained awake for more than five minutes during their sleep).
Conflicts between parents: young adults wake up more at night
The results showed that people who slept better at ages 16, 17, and 18 also tended to sleep better at age 23. Conversely, participants who experienced more conflict between their parents between ages 16 and 18 tended to have poorer sleep efficiency and more episodes of wakefulness at age 23. Total time spent sleeping, however, was not associated with the amount of parental conflict participants witnessed.
“Our findings are among the first to illustrate that exposure to parental conflict in adolescence predicts sleep problems in early adulthood. Further research into the antecedents of sleep problems in young adulthood may benefit from accounting for prior exposure to familial risk,” conclude the authors of the study.
The article titled “Exposure to parental interpartner conflict in adolescence predicts sleep problems in emerging adulthood” was written by Ryan J. Kelly, Morgan J. Thompson, and Mona El-Sheikh.
*Actigraphs allow sleep activity to be recorded reliably over an extended period of time.
