Parent education ‘can promote obesity-avoiding sleep habits in infants’

Parents can help their young children to avoid becoming obese by getting better educated on healthy sleeping habits, according to a new study.

The Penn State College of Medicine research trialled an intervention to prevent rapid infant weight gain and childhood obesity by providing parents with obesity prevention education on sleep-related behaviours, bedtime routines, improving sleep duration and avoiding feeding and rocking to sleep.

It was shown that parents who received this training were able to establish more consistent bedtime routines, earlier bedtimes, better sleep-related behaviours and longer sleep during the night than the infants of parents who received only basic safety training.

These infants were also more likely to self-soothe to sleep without being fed, and less likely to be fed back to sleep when they awoke overnight.

Study leader Dr Ian Paul said: "New parents of infants aren't thinking about obesity. Our intervention is designed to prevent obesity without having to explicitly talk to parents about their child's weight."

Given that difficult bedtimes and short sleep duration have also been shown to negatively affect a child's development and parents' mental health, the benefits of better education could be wide-ranging.