Abstract

Parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience more stress and depressive symptoms than other parents. These parents are also at risk for sleep disturbances. Given that experimental studies indicate that sleep deprivation impairs emotion regulation, poor sleep may increase the risk for mood disturbances in the context of chronic parenting stress. To better understand the role of sleep quality in the relationship between parenting stress and negative mood, 66 parents of children with ASDs completed self-report measures of daily parenting stress, negative mood, and sleep quality (e.g., sleep efficiency, sleep satisfaction) for six consecutive days. Participants also completed a questionnaire assessing depressive symptoms over the previous two weeks. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that daily negative mood was predicted by between-subject differences in parenting stress, between-subject differences in sleep efficiency, and within-subject differences in sleep satisfaction. Further, sleep quality moderated the impact of parenting stress on mood. Parents who experienced more parenting stress and reported poorer sleep efficiency than other parents experienced more negative mood. Further, parents who experienced more parenting stress reported more negative mood following a night where they had poorer sleep satisfaction than usual, compared to parents exposed to less parenting stress. Sleep satisfaction also fully mediated the relationship between parenting stress and depressive symptoms. Consistent with theories of the emotion regulation function of sleep, sleep disturbances may diminish parents’ ability to cope with the daily challenges of living with a child with ASD, thereby exacerbating the association between daily stress and negative mood.
Further, high parenting stress may increase the impact of transient sleep disturbances on mood.