ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected millions of parent in the United States by creating physical health-related stress, changes to work and parenting demands, and the possibility of losing a job or not being able to pay bills (Brooks et al., 2020). Such stressors have the potential to disrupt parents' basic, essential needs, such as sleep (e.g., Sadeh et al., 2004). Although ample re -search suggests that disturbances to parents' sleep can have diverse, negative repercussions on their own behavior and functioning (e.g., Grandner et al., 2020), there remains relatively little evidence linking parents' sleep problems to potentially disrupt parenting processes and children's behaviors. Given the emerging and established links between these diverse constructs, the proposed study -spectively influence children's behavior via parents' sleep quality and subsequent parenting practices. Methods: The sample is comprised of 1003 parents of school-aged (5-18 years old) children who completed an initial online survey (from March 27th to April 30th of 2020) followed by up to 8 weekly on-three forms of COVID-related stress: health-related stress, stress as-sociated with work/parenting demands, and finance-related stress. In the follow-ups, parents completed measures of sleep (i.e., PROMIS sleep disturbance questionnaire), parenting (e.g., Alabama Parenting Questionnaire), and child behavioral problems (i.e., CBCL). Results: Multi-level modeling results, at the between-person level, suggested that the influence of COVID-related financial stress on disturbance and angry/hostile parenting behaviors. At the within-person level, weekly spikes in parental sleep disturbance were asso-ciated with corresponding spikes in angry/hostile parenting, which, in turn, were associated with subsequent spikes in children's be- havior problems. Conclusion: Our results highlight the longitudinal impact of par-ental sleep disturbance as a mechanism linking COVID-19-related stressors, parenting, and child functioning.