Summary: New research indicates that the way parents help their toddlers fall asleep is linked to differences in the children’s temperament. Caregivers who rely more on gentle, passive methods like singing, cuddling, or reading tend to have children who score higher on sociability and calmness. In contrast, parents who frequently use active tactics such as walking, driving, or play to induce sleep report children who display greater fussiness and more difficult temperamental profiles.
Source: Frontiers
International researchers analyzed bedtime parenting techniques across 14 cultures and found consistent links between those techniques and toddlers’ temperament traits.
The team recommends emphasizing sleep-supportive parenting practices to foster healthier behavioral development worldwide.
Healthy sleep is a well-established contributor to children’s emotional regulation, cognitive functioning, and long-term mental health. Poor sleep quality can undermine attention, increase emotional reactivity, and elevate risk for later behavioral and emotional problems.
“Parental bedtime routines and techniques are tied to children’s sleep quality, and cultural context matters in shaping child development,” said corresponding author Christie Pham from Washington State University.
“We aimed to determine whether cross-cultural differences in the ways parents help toddlers fall asleep relate to differences in temperament.”
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study evaluated how different sleep-support strategies—grouped as passive or active—associate with temperament across 14 countries.
The researchers predicted that passive techniques (for example, cuddling, singing, or reading) would be linked to more favorable temperament indicators, while active techniques (such as walking with the child, car rides, or playing) would not show those benefits and might be associated with more challenging temperament patterns.
Defining child temperament
Temperament describes the typical ways children respond emotionally and regulate their behavior. Early temperament patterns influence social interactions, learning, and overall well-being and can signal risk for later difficulties. Researchers commonly describe temperament using three broad dimensions:
- Surgency (SUR): reflects positive engagement, high activity levels, enthusiasm, smiling, and approach behaviors.
- Negative Emotionality (NE): captures tendencies toward distress, fear, anger, sadness, and difficulty calming.
- Effortful Control (EC): covers attention regulation, inhibitory control, and a preference for calm activities.
Each dimension relates to distinct developmental outcomes, including behavior problems, social competence, and school performance.
To explore these relationships, researchers surveyed 841 caregivers across 14 cultural sites: Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Spain, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States.
Caregivers reported on toddlers aged 17 to 40 months (52% male) using an early childhood behavior questionnaire and a daily activities questionnaire that captured typical sleep-supporting practices.
“We applied linear multilevel regression and group-mean centering to separate within-culture and between-culture effects, allowing us to assess how variance in sleep-support practices relates to temperament,” Pham explained.
Passive versus active sleep-support techniques
The analysis revealed that both between-culture and within-culture differences in sleep-supporting methods were associated with toddler temperament, with larger effects observed across cultures. In other words, cultural patterns of bedtime behaviors help explain cross-cultural differences in temperament profiles.
“At the cultural level, greater reliance on passive bedtime strategies corresponded with toddlers showing higher sociability (higher SUR),” Pham said. “Conversely, parents reporting more active techniques tended to have children with higher Negative Emotionality—signs of fussiness and more challenging temperament.”
Specifically, passive strategies were associated with lower NE and higher SUR at the cultural level, and with higher Effortful Control at the individual level. Active strategies showed an association with higher NE within cultures but did not predict temperament differences between cultures.
When ranking cultural tendencies, the United States, Finland, and the Netherlands reported the highest endorsement of passive sleep-support techniques, while South Korea, Turkey, and China reported lower use. For active techniques, Romania, Spain, and Chile ranked highest, whereas Turkey, Italy, and Belgium ranked lower.
“These findings highlight the role of sleep-related parenting practices as possible intervention points. Encouraging more passive, calming bedtime routines could help reduce temperament profiles associated with greater distress proneness,” Pham concluded.
About this sleep and behavior research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Frontiers
Contact: Press Office – Frontiers
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Relations between bedtime parenting behaviors and temperament across 14 cultures” by Christie Pham et al., Frontiers in Psychology
Abstract
Relations between bedtime parenting behaviors and temperament across 14 cultures
Objectives: This study investigated how parental sleep-supporting behaviors during toddlerhood relate to temperament across 14 cultures. The authors predicted that passive techniques (for example, talking and cuddling) would be linked to more favorable temperament profiles—higher Surgency and Effortful Control and lower Negative Emotionality—while active techniques (for example, walking or engaging in activities to induce sleep) would not show these benefits.
Methods: Caregivers (N = 841) from 14 cultures (approximately 61 families per site) reported on toddlers aged 17 to 40 months (52% male), describing both temperament and typical sleep-supporting activities. Using multilevel regression models and group-mean centering, the study separated within-culture and between-culture variance to evaluate relationships between sleep-supporting practices and temperament.
Results: Differences in passive sleep-supporting techniques were linked to temperament at both the within-culture and between-culture levels (for example, lower Negative Emotionality between cultures and higher Effortful Control within cultures). Active techniques showed significant associations only at the within-culture level, where they related to higher Negative Emotionality. Including sleep-supporting behaviors in models explained more between-culture variance in temperament than child age and gender alone.
Conclusion: The findings largely supported the hypotheses. Parental bedtime practices appear to influence toddler temperament and may be practical targets for interventions aimed at reducing risk associated with challenging temperament profiles—particularly by decreasing reliance on active techniques that coincide with greater distress proneness.