The proposed study will measure maternal sleep with the innovative and objective method of actigraphy bracelets to determine how sleep can affect executive functioning, responsiveness and parenting of mothers. Executive functioning involves complex cognitive processes, reflecting a parent's working memory, impulse control, change of scenery, and the ability to inhibit a dominant response for a subdominant response (Bernier et al., 2013) . Sleep deficits greatly impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, an area of ​​the brain essential for executive functioning (Horne, 1993). Given that sleep affects executive functioning and this higher level of cognitive processing may be essential for parenting, executive functioning could play a mediating role in the relationship between sleep and parenting, as illustrated in theoretical model in Figure 1. Mothers with sleep deficits (active nights, night-to-night variation, and short duration) should show less effective executive functioning and, therefore, less responsiveness to their child during mother-child laboratory tasks. We expect that those mothers with less sleep and lower executive functions will also report the use of harsher parenting strategies. An additional goal of this project is to determine the relationship between sleep and various stressors, including chaos and stimulation in the home, stressful life events, difficult children, and work-family conflict. It is postulated that sleep may play a mediating role in the relationship between stress and negative parenting (see Figure 1). Finally, maternal temperament will be investigated as a potential moderator of the relationship between maternal stress, sleep, and functioning. The relationship between maternal sleep and these maternal outcomes is expected... middle of article...... mimics the individual effect of stress and sleep over time, these level one variables will be mean centered of the group. Structural equation modeling with Mplus could also be used to examine latent factors in measurement methods for each variable. For example, a latent factor of parenting can be formed using the mother's self-assessment of parenting strategies from questionnaires, an observer's report of parent-child interactions during the visit to home and observer report from the coding of maternal responsiveness from the laboratory visit. Integrating measures of family chaos, domestic stimulation, parents' daily hassles, stressful life events, and work-family conflict could also constitute a latent factor of stress. This would provide a parsimonious analysis of global variables, such as parenting and stress, while using the rich data from a multi-method measurement approach..