Coparenting and bedtime settling difficulties in infants and toddlers: A pilot cross-sectional study from Türkiye

Coparenting refers to how caregivers coordinate, support, and manage disagreement/conflict in raising a child, and may be particularly salient during bedtime routines that require predictability and shared coordination. This cross-sectional exploratory pilot study examined associations between coparenting dimensions and infant/toddler sleep outcomes in a clinical sample from Türkiye. Families with infants/toddlers aged 0–36 months were recruited consecutively from a general child and adolescent psychiatry outpatient clinic at Eskişehir City Hospital between 01 October 2025 and 10 January 2026. Mothers completed the Expanded Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire (BISQ-E), and both parents completed the Coparenting Relationship Scale (CRS). Primary analyses were prespecified age-adjusted partial correlations (partial r) controlling for child age, focusing on parent-mean CRS scores and three bedtime/settling outcomes. Of 40 consenting families, 30 completed all measures and comprised the analytic sample (mean child age 23.6 ± 8.8 months; 60% male). Most children room-shared with parents (76.7%), and 63.3% of parents perceived their child’s sleep as at least some degree of a problem despite generally favorable night sleep quality ratings. In the age-adjusted parent-mean model, later bedtime routine start time was associated with higher coparenting conflict (partial r = 0.590; q = 0.011) and undermining (partial r = 0.469; q = 0.039), and with lower coparenting support (partial r = −0.485; q = 0.038). More frequent sleep-onset difficulties were associated with higher coparenting conflict (partial r = 0.499; q = 0.038). Greater coparenting disagreement was moderately associated with greater bedtime difficulty (partial r = −0.438) but did not survive BH-FDR correction (q = 0.052). In exploratory parent-specific models, paternal exposure to conflict was additionally associated with more frequent night wakings (partial r = 0.436). These pilot findings suggest that coparenting functioning may be more consistently linked to bedtime/settling processes than to sleep maintenance in early childhood, supporting larger longitudinal, dyadic studies incorporating child temperament and parental distress indicators.