Sleep Is a Family Affair: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies on the Interplay between Adolescents’ Sleep and Family Factors

Abstract

Family is one of the primary socialization contexts influencing adolescents’ psychological health. In this regard, a crucial indicator of adolescents’ health is their sleep quality. Nevertheless, it is still unclear how multiple family factors (i.e., demographic and relational) are intertwined with adolescents’ sleep quality. For this reason, this systematic review with meta-analysis aims to comprehensively summarize and integrate previous longitudinal research investigating the reciprocal relation between demographics (e.g., family structure) and positive (e.g., family support) and negative (e.g., family chaos) relational family factors and adolescents’ sleep quality. Several search strategies were applied, and a final set of 23 longitudinal studies that matched the eligibility criteria were included in this review. The total number of participants was 38,010, with an average age at baseline of 14.7 years (SD = 1.6, range: 11–18 years). On the one hand, the meta-analytic results showed that demographic factors (e.g., low socio-economic status) were not related to adolescents’ sleep quality at a later time point. On the other hand, positive and negative family relational factors were positively and negatively related to adolescents’ sleep, respectively. Furthermore, the results suggested that this association could be bidirectional. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.