The study, conducted in Wisconsin USA, focused on how working
parents sleep at different stages in their children’s lives. It’s no surprise
that parents of young children (under age 2) lost the most sleep. What may be a
bit surprising is the amount of sleep these parents lost, only an average of 13
minutes per day for each child under the age 2! Parents lost on average 9
minutes of sleep per day for each child aged 2-5 years. Keep in mind that this is an average! Parents may
lose an hour of sleep one night and lose no sleep for the next 3 nights. Based
on the results of this study, the researchers report that raising a child from
birth through age 18 results in a loss of about 645 hours of sleep.
Other outcomes noted were daytime sleepiness and dozing off
during daytime activities. Both of these were more common in parents of
children over age 2.
While this study may not seem to describe the very real sleep
deprivation you may be feeling as a new parent, it does show how research and
reality can differ at times! The limitation in this particular study is that
the sleep duration was self-reported by the parents. The authors admit that sleep
is often over estimated in these cases, so the amount of sleep lost per child
may be under estimated in this study.
What do you think about the results of this study?
Reference
Hagen EW, Mirer AG, Palta M, Peppard PE. The Sleep-Time Cost
of Parenting: Sleep Duration and Sleepiness Among Employed Parents in the
Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. Am J Epidemiol 2013 Feb 1.
