Health Promotion in Early Adolescence: Sleep, Activity, and Emotion Regulation

The primary goal of this project is to examine the short and long-term effects of an intervention focusing on three interrelated dimensions of health: improving sleep, increasing physical activity, and improving skills in emotion regulation. This intervention targets high-risk youth at a key neuromaturational period-early adolescence-when many individuals are experiencing new challenges to regulatory systems involved in sleep, activity, and emotion regulation. This maturational period is also a crucial time in the normal development of habits, skills, and proclivities in each of these domains. Thus, early adolescence presents unique opportunities for intervention targeting these three interrelated regulatory systems. Participants will include 200 9-13 year-old children who are siblings of children enrolled in one of three ongoing studies of vulnerability and resilience, whose families were initially identified on the basis of sociodemographic, child, and/or family risk or are recruited thru local Family Centers. Children will be selected as having difficulties in at least one of these domains (sleep, sedentary behavior, or emotion regulation) and then randomly assigned to either a control or intervention group. All families will receive baseline, one- and two-year follow-up assessments of child sleep, physical activity, and emotion regulation. Families in the intervention group will have the opportunity to receive feedback and intervention services on these three child domains and other parenting and family issues (e.g., parent involvement, parent self-care, school problems) following the initial assessment and the one-year follow up. The intervention will involve the parent and target youth receiving feedback about the child's current status in these areas and family functioning. If desired, the family will also participate in follow-up meetings with the parent and/or target youth to improve the youth's sleep, physical activity, and/or emotion regulation skills, as well as aspects of the family environment. The investigators hypothesize that the intervention will be associated with improvements in sleep, physical activity, and emotion regulation among those in the intervention group, as well as improvements in measures of social, behavioral, and affective function. Finally, the investigators will explore the possibility that increases in parental involvement mediate some of the changes found in child sleep, physical activity, and emotion regulation.