Another joy of parenthood? You won’t sleep right for six years, study finds
Parents’ sleep schedules can be permanently disrupted for as long as six years after the birth of a child, a new study shows.
Researchers from the University of Warwick in the UK partnered with West Virginia University researchers to study nearly 4,700 parents who had a child from 2008 through 2015, and their findings present a pretty far-reaching idea of just how much sleep kids cost their parents.
The study was published in the journal “Sleep” in January, and the biggest picture finding might also be the most grim for prospective parents.
“Following the sharp decline in sleep satisfaction and duration in the first months postpartum, neither mothers’ nor fathers’ sleep fully recovers to pre-pregnancy levels up to six years after the birth of their first child,” the study says.
That finding surprised even the researchers, who surveyed the parents as their families grew, asking them to rate the quality of their sleep and log how many hours of sleep they got on a normal weekday and weekend.
“We didn’t expect to find that, but we believe that there are certainly many changes in the responsibilities you have,” Dr. Sakari Lemola, co-author of the research from the University of Warwick, told the Guardian. Those changing responsibilities include things like nighttime illnesses, bad dreams and the associated stress parents suffer from as a result of those episodes, the newspaper reported.
Women are hit harder by this sort of sleep deprivation than men, the study says. Mothers in the reported their sleep quality to be worse than fathers did throughout the test population.
In the first year after the birth of a child, that imbalance in sleep deprivation is even more pronounced. Fathers reported losing about 15 minutes worth of sleep per night during this time, while mothers reported losing about an hour.
“Women tend to experience more sleep disruption than men after the birth of a child reflecting that mothers are still more often in the role of the primary caregiver than fathers,” Lemola told Science Daily.
Even four-to-six years down the line, women still reported sleeping about 20 minutes fewer per night than their pre-pregnancy sleep rate, while men reported sleeping about 15 minutes less, just like the first year after a child’s birth, according to the findings.
