Hello, my name is Lauren Sia, and I'm a fourth-year medical student at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, located in Athens, Ohio. My poster is titled, Relationships Between Child Health Behaviors, Mental Health, Family Functioning, and Child Sleep Habits, A Cross-Sectional Analysis from the BEAR Study. The author of the poster is myself, as well as my research PI, Dr. Emily Goosman. A little bit about the BEAR Study. The BEAR Study consists of children ages 8 to 14 and their primary caregiver. We are measuring children's stress levels, physical activity, and sleep data, trying to see how these variables interact with one another. I chose to explore this population because I hope to pursue a career in pediatrics, and I am getting ready to apply to pediatric residency programs. So I wanted to see how sleep and family dynamics might be associated with child mental health. So what do we already know? We know that sufficient sleep for children is vital for physical, cognitive, and emotional development. But excessive sleep or insufficient sleep can lead to irritability, mood changes, and behavior problems. We know that healthy family dynamics, so shared family values, a stable home life, are instrumental to the emotional well-being of children, and that providing a secure, nurturing environment can have lasting impacts on mental health, whereas a dysfunctional family unit can lead to at-risk behaviors and decreased academic achievement. The objective of my study was to determine whether sleep and family dynamics are associated with child mental health in a sample of 8 to 14-year-old children in a rural community. In regards to our methods, our participants were recruited from January of 2022 through November of 2023. We recruited between 8 to 14.9-year-old children, as well as their self-identified primary parent or caregiver. We recruited from the local community, so school districts, email listservs, flyers, social media, et cetera. We used numerous measures to assess for mental health, sleep, and family functioning, most of which were parent-reported. Statistical analyses included looking at the mean, standard deviations, and frequencies, as well as Pearson correlations and linear regressions. All analyses were performed in SPSS, and the osteopathic significance of my poster is the incorporation of the biopsychosocial model to understand how health behaviors and family characteristics influence child health and development, so really just looking at how the social aspect, that being their familial environment, can affect more specifically the psych development of children. So for my results, table 1 shows the characteristics of the sample. You can see our average age was 10.4 years old. We did include maturity offset. Maturity offset is an equation we use to account for puberty changes. We usually do see a difference in maturity offset between male and females due to the early onset of puberty in females compared to males. Table 2 shows the characteristics of the families within the sample. The reason I included this table is to give a little bit of insight into the type of family dynamics that our participants might have been experiencing. So nearly 78% of them are married. You can see that the income majority fell between $75,000 to $150,000. Employment status, majority were full-time, and you can also see that there are some families where there were multiple children in the home, which may contribute to the stability and family dynamic. So you can see here from our two figures, the first one depicting the raw scores from the DSM-5. The DSM-5, the scores range from 1 to 5, 5 being the worst. So you can see here that the majority of our children are relatively healthy when it comes to mental health. And then if you look at the mean scores for the McMaster Family Assessment Device, this scale is 1 to 4, with 4 being the worst. You can see that involvement, responsiveness, behavioral control, those may be higher than the others, but relatively speaking, majority of them are on the lower end, indicating pretty high-functioning families. So in conclusion, in this study, we saw that there was no relationship found between child behaviors, family functioning, and sleep with child mental health. Overall, the children, like I said, they scored in the, quote, normal range for the DSM-5, and there was little between individual variability. Like I said, a lot of our children were similar, and similar in that they were healthy. I think it is important to note that 87.8, nearly 88% of our children in the study are receiving at least 9 hours of sleep per parent report. You know that's a good, and that's a good thing because we know that sleep is important for children, and whether that's emotional development, physical development, et cetera. So some limitations of our study include, like I said, these measures, majority are parent-reported, so the child's perception and response may be much different. However, it is hard when you're assessing children of a younger age, like 8 years old, so we do turn to their parents for hopefully the most reliable information. Our sample size was also relatively small, and we wanted to note that generalizability of the study may be a limitation as well. So in the future, plans for this study would be to put in efforts to diversify, as well as increase our sample size, so that we could get a wider range of responses from the children. Like I said, we are recruiting in a small rural community, so in the future, there could be efforts to broaden our recruitment distance, and then further investigate the relationship here. So you can see on the poster, I do have my references listed that I used for the poster and abstract, and then as well as my acknowledgments, I would like to thank the CTRU staff, that is the department that helps recruit and run the data collection, particularly Crystal Brooks, who was instrumental in data collection and organization, and then as well as our student research assistants. And of course, I'd like to thank all of our study participants for making this poster possible. Thank you all so much for your time.

child health behaviors

sleep and mental health

family dynamics

BEAR Study

rural community research