Developing and Implementing Sleep Health Education for Foster Care Personnel

2022 Community Sleep Health and Public Awareness Grant

Carol Ripple, PhD
PAJAMA PROGRAM

Key Project Outcomes

Children who experience trauma face challenges to their overall well-being and often have problems with sleep. Not surprisingly, sleep problems are common and often severe among children in foster care. Yet, evidence shows that foster care agency staff may not have access to the information and strategies they need to promote sleep health and address sleep problems. With support from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, our collaborative team of academic and non-profit members sought to extend our research on sleep in foster care by learning more about agency staff’s knowledge, strategies, and needs related to healthy sleep. For this project, we interviewed 36 foster care workers across four states with the aim of developing sleep health education workshops that are trauma-informed and responsive to the needs of the foster care community.

What we learned: more than half (61%) of the interviewees did not have strategies for addressing sleep problems; nearly all (94%) reported that their agency referred sleep issues to a therapist, pediatrician, psychiatrist, or sleep consultant; many children were given prescribed sleep medication and/or melatonin; caregiver sleep suffered as a result of children’s sleep problems; and interviewees would welcome sleep health education that provides knowledge and strategies. These results informed the development of a staff workshop delivered in fall 2023. Workshop content includes an overview of healthy sleep and the effects of trauma on sleep, common sleep problems among children in foster care, behavioral strategies to share with foster parents, and recommendations for incorporating healthy sleep into routine practice and case records. Evaluation surveys and interviews with key informants were uniformly positive and reflected strong interest in sleep health education for new and experienced foster parents to complement the staff workshop.

Our project builds on voices from the foster care community to raise awareness about the importance of sleep for child well-being, emphasize the high prevalence and severity of sleep problems among children in foster care, and deliver trauma-informed sleep health

education to the foster care community. Next steps are to fully develop sleep health education for foster parents and expand implementation of staff workshops. We also seek to attract interest from local, state, and national audiences that can help amplify attention to sleep among children and families in the foster care community.

Journal Articles

Child Welfare

Foster Care Workers’ Understanding of Sleep Health among Children in their Care