Principal Investigators:
Co-Principal Investigators:
The goal of this project is to understand the contributions of poverty-related disparities in neighborhood and housing to sleep and mental health problems in early childhood. We will leverage data from an ongoing randomized controlled trial, the Parent and Toddler Health (PATH) project, which focuses on low-income families in the Boston and Denver metropolitan areas with toddlers experiencing co-morbid sleep and mental health problems. This award will enable us to conduct geocoding to assess neighborhood-level factors, including noise pollution, risk of lead paint exposure, access to neighborhood opportunities, and heat island severity, and to use spatial analyses to examine these factors in relation to actigraph and parent-reported indices of toddler sleep and mental health. Further, we will conduct brief interviews with participants to assess family-level rent burden, housing stability, and crowding, and these factors will also be examined in relation to toddler sleep and mental health. We hope that results will inform child and family policy and community-focused intervention approaches.