Interrelationship between sleep quality of 1-month old infants and their mothers’ corresponding activities

The aim was to examine the interrelationship between sleep quality of 1-month infants and mothers, mothers’ corresponding activities to infant’s night sleep, and mother’s mental health. A cross-sectional survey with self-reported questionnaire was conducted among 437 healthy mother–infant pairs at 1-month postpartum delivered at a maternal hospital in Tokyo. The main measurements were the presence of mother’s sleep problem, the presence of infant’s unstable sleep quality (hereinafter, unstable sleep), mother’s stimulating activities, such as responding to active sleep immediately, and four indices of mothers’ mental health. After comparing statistically, the basic characteristics and above main measurements with and without infant unstable sleep, a covariance structure analysis was conducted to investigate the association among four main measurements according to the hypotheses made based on previous studies. The infants’ unstable sleep affected the mothers’ sleep problem (β = 0.12), the mothers’ sleep problem affected the stimulating activities (β = 0.11) and the stimulating activities affected the infants’ unstable sleep (β = 0.11). The infants’ unstable sleep and mothers’ sleep problem affected the mothers’ mental health directly (β = 0.20, β = 0.15). The values of GFI (0.993, AGFI (0) and RMSEA (0.032) showed a high fitness of the model. The inter-relationships between the infants’ unstable sleep, mothers’ sleep problem, mothers' stimulating activities, and mothers’ mental health were verified in just 1 month post birth. It is significant that those relationships were obtained in the neonatal periods. The result that mothers’ stimulating activities affect infants’ unstable sleep is important with implications on sleep health education.