A Penn State news release indicates that a workplace intervention designed to reduce work-family conflict can positively impact the sleep of the employee’s children.
The intervention, Support-Transform-Achieve-Results (STAR), includes training supervisors to be more supportive of their employees’ personal and family lives, changing the structure of work so that employees have more control over their work time, and changing the culture in the workplace so that colleagues are more supportive of each other’s efforts to integrate their work and personal lives.
The research team conducted several other tests of the effects of the intervention. In an earlier study, for example, they showed that STAR resulted in employed parents spending more time with their children without reducing their work time.
In this study, the researchers found that children whose parents participated in the STAR intervention showed an improved quality of sleep one year later compared to the children of employees who were randomly assigned to a control group. The researchers published their findings in the June issue out today (May 20) of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
