An eight-year study following a group of adolescents into emerging adulthood found that individuals exposed to more conflict between their parents during adolescence tended to have more sleep problems as emerging adults. These individuals generally had lower sleep efficiency and experienced a higher number of long wake episodes. The study was published in Sleep Health.
Many children witness conflicts between their parents. Studies indicate that over 40% of adolescents are exposed to verbal conflicts between their parents each year, while 22% witness physical conflict. Witnessing conflict, particularly violent conflict, is stressful for children and adolescents and can lead to sleep problems.
Research shows that adolescents from high-conflict homes often experience insufficient and poor-quality sleep. However, most studies only report simultaneous associations and do not follow children to determine how long these changes in sleep patterns last. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are periods of rapid transformation, and sleep problems observed in adolescence often persist into emerging adulthood.
Study author Ryan J. Kelly and his colleagues sought to examine the relationship between witnessing conflict between parents during adolescence (ages 16-18) and sleep quality in emerging adulthood (age 23). They hypothesized that greater exposure to parental conflict during adolescence would predict more sleep-related problems in emerging adulthood.
Study participants were families involved in the Family Stress and Youth Development study, an ongoing longitudinal study examining family functioning from childhood to emerging adulthood. Data used in this analysis were collected between 2012 and 2020, when participants were between 16 and 23 years old. The initial group consisted of 245 adolescents, but as participants gradually left the study over time, 189 remained by the time they reached 23 years of age.
At ages 16-18, participants reported on conflicts between their parents using the Children’s Perception of Interparental Conflict Scale. At various points during the study, participants wore actigraphs while they slept. Actigraphs are devices, usually worn on the wrist, that record body movements, allowing researchers to infer when a person is sleeping and how well.
In this study, the authors focused on three key sleep measures: time spent sleeping, sleep efficiency (the percentage of time participants spent sleeping between falling asleep and waking), and long wake episodes (the number of times participants woke and stayed awake for longer than five minutes during sleep).
Results showed that individuals who slept better at ages 16, 17, and 18 also tended to sleep better at age 23. However, participants who experienced more conflict between their parents at ages 16-18 tended to have lower sleep efficiency and a higher number of long wake episodes at age 23. The total time spent sleeping was not associated with the amount of parental conflict participants had witnessed.
“Results build on the literature to consider sleep in the family context and are among the first to illustrate that exposure to parental interpartner conflict [conflict between parents] in adolescence predicts sleep problems in emerging adulthood. Continued investigations into the antecedents of sleep problems in emerging adulthood may benefit from considering past exposure to family risk,” the study authors concluded.
While the study sheds light on the links between witnessing parental conflict and sleep quality, it also has limitations. Notably, the participants in this study rarely experienced clinical levels of sleep problems. If they did, the issues were mild. It remains unclear whether these findings can be generalized to individuals with clinical levels of sleep problems. Additionally, it is unknown how often participants continued to witness parental conflict at age 23. If this occurred frequently, it is possible that current parental conflicts, rather than past ones, were contributing to sleep problems.
The paper, “Exposure to parental interpartner conflict in adolescence predicts sleep problems in emerging adulthood,” was authored by Ryan J. Kelly, Morgan J. Thompson, and Mona El-Sheikh.