604 The Relationship between Birth Order and Sleep Patterns in 6-Month-Olds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction The influence of birth order has been investigated in many areas of child development, but few studies have examined its relationship with infant sleep; those that have yield contradictory findings. Moreover, nocturnal parental practices may differ depending on the number of children, but these characteristics are rarely studied. This study aimed to compare nocturnal parental practices and sleep patterns of first-born to non-first-born 6-month-olds. Methods The mothers of fifty-two 6-month-olds completed a 14-day sleep diary to record their infant’s sleep. The following variables were averaged: total nocturnal sleep duration (in minutes), longest consecutive sleep duration (without interruption; in minutes) and number of nocturnal awakenings. Independent t-tests were used to compare each sleep variable between first-borns (n = 21) and non-first-borns (2nd, 3rd or 4th born, n = 31). Chi-square tests were used to compare parental sleep practices (breastfeeding frequency and infant sleep location) between first-borns and non-first-borns. Results First-borns had a longer consecutive nocturnal sleep duration (417.83 ± 142.42 vs. 310.08 ± 118.23; p < .01) and fewer nocturnal awakenings (1.69 ± 1.07 vs. 2.57 ± 1.09; p < .01) than non-first-borns. However, first-born and non-first-born infants did not differ in terms of total nocturnal sleep duration (p > .05). Breastfeeding frequency and sleep location differed as a function of birth order: 57.9% of first-born infants were exclusively breastfed, compared to 89.7% of non-firstborn infants (χ2 (1, N = 52) = 6.56; p < .05). Furthermore, 20.0% of first-borns slept in the parents’ room, compared to 56.7% of non-first-borns (χ2 (1, N = 50) = 6.62; p < .05). Conclusion First-born infants had longer periods of consecutive sleep and fewer nocturnal awakenings than non-first-borns; however, birth order was not associated with maternal reports of total nocturnal sleep duration. These results suggest that non-first-borns have more fragmented sleep. Moreover, sleep-related practices also differed between mothers of first-born and non-first-born infants. A study conducted in a larger sample and using objective sleep measures could clarify whether these different sleep patterns reflect specific nocturnal parental sleep-related practices, or if the presence of other children in the home play a role in infant sleep consolidation. Support (if any) SSHRC, FRQS
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".