May 22, 2015 02:12 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research suggests that a workplace intervention could reduce improve patterns in employees' children.

Researchers at Penn State University found that the intervention, Support-Transform-Achieve-Results (STAR), could reduce work-family conflict and increase schedule flexibility. They found that it also positively influence the sleep patterns of the employees' children.

"These findings show the powerful effect that parents' workplace experiences can have on their children," researcher Susan McHale said in a statement. "The STAR intervention focused solely on workplace experiences, not on parenting practices. We can speculate that the STAR intervention helped parents to be more physically and emotionally available when their children needed them to be."

For the study, researchers conducted several other tests of the effects of the intervention. In an earlier study, for example, they showed that STAR resulted in employed parents spending more time with their children without reducing their work time. They also measured sleep patterns by interviewing employees' children on the phone every evening for eight consecutive evenings both before and after the STAR intervention.

They observed that children whose parents participated in the intervention improved their quality of sleep one year later compared to the children of employees who were randomly assigned to a control group.

McHale and her team measured sleep patterns by interviewing. Each night they asked the children about their sleep on the prior night, including what time they went to bed, what time they woke up that morning, how well they slept and how hard it was to fall asleep.

The findings are detailed in the June issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

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