Fig 1.
Sleep behavior is an umbrella protecting developmental outcomes from influences of contextual stress [64–66].
Fig 2.
During April 2020, the first survey was completed to assess parent-reported sleep of young children during the confinement «during-CONFINEMENT» with the identical questions addressing the time before the confinement «pre-CONFINEMENT». In November 2020, a “FOLLOW-UP” was completed to assess executive functions with a questionnaire referring to children’s behavior retrospectively for the preceding 6 months.
Table 1.
Subscales of executive function quantified from the BRIEF-P: Inhibit shift, emotional control working memory, and plan/organize.
Fig 3.
Overview of BRIEF-P standard analysis to quantify executive functions in preschool children, including computation of subscales, indices, and composite score.
Table 2.
Indices of executive function quantified from the BRIEF-P: Inhibitory self control, flexibility and emergent metacognition.
Fig 4.
Acute changes in sleep behaviors in preschool children during the COVID-19 confinement.
In pink, distribution of sleep behaviors is presented for pre-CONFINEMENT, orange refers to sleep during-CONFINEMENT. Dots represent values of individual subjects. Significance level based on a Wilcoxon signed-rank test is indicated as *p<0.01.
Fig 5.
Prediction of executive functions indices by confinement-induced sleep behavior changes in young children.
(A): The change in sleep is computed from subtraction pre-to-during-CONFINEMENT in each sleep behavior. Missing values indicate that sleep behavior did not survive the statistical backward selection, b indicates unstandardized beta coefficients, p represents corrected p-values from the linear mixed model. (B) Evolution of the change pre-to-during-CONFINEMENT of Nighttime awakenings and his association with the Inhibitory Self Control Indices. Dashed line automatically fitted with Excel software.
Fig 6.
Prediction of executive function subscales by confinement-induced sleep behavior changes in young children.
(A)The change in sleep is computed from subtraction pre-to-during-CONFINEMENT in each sleep behavior. Missing values indicate that sleep behavior did not survive the statistical backward selection, b indicates unstandardized beta coefficients, p represents corrected p-values from the linear mixed model. (B) Evolution of the change pre-to-during-CONFINEMENT of Nighttime awakenings and his association with the Inhibit and Emotional Control Subscale. Dashed line automatically fitted with Excel software.