0786 Sleep Problems and Associations with Mental Health Among Children Recently Adopted from Foster Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Trauma and early adversity are known to increase risk for both sleep and psychological disturbances, placing children who spend time in foster care at a higher risk for these problems than other populations of youth. Recent research has shown most children in foster care experience impairing sleep problems, but little is known of whether and how these problems relate to longer-term mental health. Thus, among a large sample of children recently adopted from foster care, we examined the prevalence of sleep-related problems when children were first placed in the foster home and their associations with current mental health problems. Methods N=234 parents of children, 4–11 years (M=5.94, SD=1.97) adopted from foster care in the U.S. within the past two years completed an online survey about their children’s sleep and mental health. Participants were recruited through private social media groups for foster, kinship, and/or adoptive caregivers. Parents were asked to report the specific types of sleep-related problems children exhibited at time of first arrival in home and completed validated measures of child anxiety and depressive symptoms regarding their child’s current functioning. Results After first arriving in the home, 82.9% of children were reported to experience at least one sleep-related problem. Further, 58.5% were reported to experience nighttime awakenings, 37.2% exhibited fear of the dark, and 32.1% had trouble sleeping alone. Approximately one quarter of children wet the bed (27.8%), struggled with staying in bed (27.8%), experienced nightmares (26.1%), and/or had night terrors (22.6%). Total number of sleep-related problems was significantly positively correlated with child age (r (234) = .30, p < .001), as well as current separation anxiety (r (234) = .16, p < .05), generalized anxiety (r (234) = .33, p < .001), and depressive symptoms (r(234) = .23, p < .001). Conclusion Our findings align with previous reports indicating high rates of sleep-related problems among youth in foster care and further suggest that these early problems may be a harbinger for mental health problems even after children achieve permanence. Findings call for greater attention toward sleep health among children in foster care and other alternative care settings. Support (if any)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".