Childhood insomnia, internalising and externalising symptoms among Hong Kong primary school students : the role of emotion regulation

Abstract

Assessments of insomnia in children have relied heavily on parent report. However, research has demonstrated that parent report of a child’s sleep may sometimes be biased, and self-report could potentially be a reliable source of information. Using a multi-informant format, this study examined the consistency of child-reported and parent-reported sleep difficulties in school-age children. Also, building on previous studies that adopted short surveys to examine how sleep problems were associated with psychopathology, the current study employed a comprehensive array of sleep subscales to explore the mediating role of emotion regulation in the relationship between sleep difficulties and childhood internalising/externalising behaviours. Low agreement rates between parent- and child-report sleep measures were found, which could be affected by child- and family-related factors including child’s age, room sharing with parents, parent’s awareness of the child’s wakefulness, family income and parental education level. The findings call for the need for future multi-informant assessments of childhood sleep problems. Furthermore, emotion regulation was found to mediate the relationship between parent-reported/ child-reported sleep and psychopathology. The current findings provided insights into the potential mechanism underlying the link between sleep problems and childhood emotional and behavioural problems.