Fights Between Parents Affect Baby Sleep

(valeriewriter.com)

It has been widely known that fights between parents can affect children very much and that these children may develop some behavioral problems of their own later in life. Now, however, it seems that these fights between couples can affect even newly born babies.

According to the new study, marital instability can lead to child sleep problems, such as trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. From what study author Anne Mannering, PhD said, it seems that these sleep problems can cause a lot of damage in the future life of the baby, as he or she may develop some serious behavioral problems in the future. Furthermore, it seems that children, whose parents fought while they were 9 months old or even younger, had problems in school later in life, as they could not concentrate. Parents should be aware that stress in the marriage can potentially impact their child even at a very young age,” said Mannering.

According to Mannering and her team of researchers, they wanted to see if the fights between parents have something to do with the baby’s sleep and they wanted to eliminate any type of role of shared genes between parents and babies. Thus, the study was solely based on families who had adopted children, in order to eliminate any type of confusion related to how the genes might have influenced a baby’s sleep. 350 families participated in the study and what the researchers did was to interview the families in order to find out if their quarrels had anything to do with the fact that their children were not sleeping. According to the results, the link between the fights the parents may have and the inability of the baby to sleep is very strong. The researchers said that they found that babies who had assisted some fights between their parents when they were 9 months old had sleeping problems when they were 18 months old. The findings still held even after things such as birth order, parents’ anxiety and difficult infant temperament were taken into account.

Furthermore, according to Manning, the parents that were interviewed were all middle-class, educated white people who had adopted their babies at about 3 months of age. Manning went on saying that future studies must be made in order to determine whether children still have these sleeping problems after they are older than 2 years. She also said that parents should be really careful when they fight, because their fights affect their children’s lives very much, even though the effects are not seen immediately. As you could see, 9 months had to pass from a fight for the baby to develop sleeping problems. This means that children are highly affected by such things and that they should be protected, in order to keep them safe and away from problems they may develop later in life.11