Parental Values Are Associated With How Parents Feel About Their Infants' Sleep, but Not the Quality of Infants' Sleep

Values help shape behavior and influence how individuals assess themselves and others. Previous research on the relation between values and parenting has largely overlooked the impact of values on parenting during infancy. This study is the first to link parents' value systems to contexts meaningful to parents of infants—sleep and parent-child interactions. We explored the value systems underlying individual differences in parents' cognitions about their infants' sleep, including whether there were gender differences in parents' values. We examined whether those values directly related to their own parenting behaviors and interactions with their infants, and whether those values subsequently related to the quality of their infants' sleep. 1685 parents of infants (3–18 months) participated in an online survey on values and parenting-related choices and beliefs. Families used Nanit, a video baby monitoring system that uses computer vision technology to calculate nightly summary sleep characteristics (e.g., quality of night sleep, parent visits, night wakings). Value profiles depended on parent gender and were associated with cognitions about infant sleep and with parents' interactions with their infants, but were not associated with the quality of infants' sleep. These findings have implications for anticipating factors that could be stressful around the transition to parenthood and for interventions targeting parents' mental health and infants' sleep health.