The proposed study will measure maternal sleep with the innovative and objective method of actigraphy bracelets to determine how sleep might influence mothers' executive functioning, responsiveness and parenting . Executive functioning involves complex cognitive processes, reflecting the parent's working memory, impulse control, schema shifting, and the ability to inhibit a dominant response for a subdominant (Bernier et al., 2013). Sleep deficits significantly impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, an area of ​​the brain critical to executive functioning (Horne, 1993). Because sleep influences executive functioning and this higher level of cognitive processing may be critical to parenting, executive functioning could mediate the relationship between sleep and parenting, as illustrated in the theoretical model in Figure 1. Sleep-deficit mothers (nights active, variation between nights, and of short duration) should show less effective executive functioning and, consequently, less reactivity towards the child during mother-child laboratory activities. We expect that these mothers with less sleep and poorer executive functions will also report the use of more severe parenting strategies. An additional goal of this project is to determine the relationship between sleep and various stressors, including household chaos and stimulation, stressful life events, difficult children, and work-family conflict. It is hypothesized that sleep may mediate the relationship between stress and negative parenting (see Figure 1). Finally, maternal temperament will be studied as a potential moderator of the relationship between maternal stress, sleep, and functioning. The relationship between maternal sleep and these maternal outcomes is predicted… halfway through the paper… ima the individual temporal effect of stress and sleep, these level one variables will be centered on the group mean. Structural equation modeling with Mplus could also be used to examine latent factors in the measurement methods for each variable. For example, a parenting latent factor can be formed using maternal self-report of parenting strategies from questionnaires, observer report of parent-child interactions from the home visit, and observer report from coding of maternal responsiveness of the home visit. laboratory. Incorporating measures of household chaos, household stimulation, daily parental hassles, stressful life events, and work-family conflict may also constitute latent stressors. This would provide a parsimonious analysis of general variables, such as parenting and stress, while still utilizing the rich data from a multi-method approach to measurement.