Hello, I’m Kaylee Bangs, a rising sophomore and Biobehavioral Health Major. Along with taking a
few classes and having the awesome job as a LEAP mentor, this summer has been filled with research here at University Park. I am from the small town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and, apart from my love of learning; I enjoy being outside as much as possible! After graduation, I really hope to join the Peace Corps before ending up in medical school. On the side of my other passions, I love to study early childhood development under the direction of Dr. Douglas Teti. I am very fortunate to have received a summer research grant proved by the John T. and Paige S. Smith Endowment for Undergraduate research that has enabled me to continue my work on infant sleep.

As a freshman, I was fulfilling my simple freshman duties of searching for possible research labs to work in. When I read the short blurb about project S.I.E.S.T.A. II, I knew I wanted to get involved right away. I was soon trained in watching videos of infant bedtime routines and learned to code certain infant behaviors along with parent-child interactions. However, coding wasn’t enough. I wanted to learn more. So, this summer I’ve gotten to start my own project. I am exploring the question “How does parental presence affect the quality of infant sleep”.

I think that parenting behaviors (and really all human behaviors) are very interesting to study because I feel that the impacts of simple behaviors are often overlooked. For example:  visiting your baby’s room throughout the night. Past research has demonstrated that greater parent presence and contact with the infant during the night is associated with poorer quality sleep in infants (Mindell et al., 2009, Sadeh et al., 2010). Dr. Teti’s Project SIESTA II has acquired approximately 100 videos of infant sleep across multiple ages as well as sleep data measured through actigraphs and nighttime video. Using these methods, the effect of parent presence and contact during the night on infant sleep quality can be studied in much greater depth and accuracy. This project could help determine what types of parental activities at night time best promote quality sleep for infants.

This seemed to be an overwhelming question at first as I had only previously been qualified to observe and quantify bedtime behaviors; however, I soon was taught how to run simple statistical tests in order to find correlations within our data. I am currently in the process of running data and testing different variables such as wake frequency, duration, and fragmentation in relation with parental presence at nighttime. I am so excited to continue my research throughout the summer and report back on what I have discovered.

Until then, back to watching infants sleep! Thanks for reading!