When a baby comes into your life, you immediately realize that your nights will never be what they were. In the first year of the baby, parents lose more than 700 hours of sleep, and if they also come later brothers, we better not account for the number of nights you will not sleep at the stretch.
Without a doubt, it is one of the great sacrifices that parents make, and there is even research on it. Some studies have been interested in sleep deprivation in men and women as parents and there are conclusions for all tastes about who sleeps less when a baby arrives in the family.
Mothers wake up more
A recent study conducted by the American Academy of Neurology and the University of South Georgia, tilts the scales towards zombie mothers who dream of sleeping a whole night.
In a telephone survey of 5,805 people in the United States, among women, the only factor associated with not getting enough sleep was having children at home. With each child they had, the probability of having an insufficient amount of sleep increased to almost 50%. For their part, the men responded that they did not affect their sleep hours at all, whether or not there were children at home.
Mothers wake up more times during the night. His dream is more fragmented, and therefore, of worse quality, although some are lucky to recover hours of sleep during the day.When women were asked how many hours they slept, almost half of the women who had children (48%) acknowledged sleeping at least six hours each day, compared with 62% of those without children.
Keep in mind that during maternity leave and in cases where the woman does not work outside and stays at home with her baby, sometimes they can recover hours of sleep during the day taking advantage of the baby's naps (although most of the time it is more a wish than a reality).
That is, almost half of the mothers get to sleep more than six hours, but his dream is more fragmented, being a less restful dream, which affects your state of generalized tiredness.
Men have no breasts
While the father is increasingly involved in raising children, most of the responsibility rests with the mother, especially at night when the baby claims the breast. It is she who "breastfeeds" (never better) at odd hours to breastfeed the baby.
And even if the colecho is practiced and falls asleep with the tit outside, it is more comfortable to breastfeed the baby without getting out of bed, sleep quality is not the same.
Especially during the first months of your child's life you sleep with one eye open and the other closed, controlling your baby at all times and aware of any need you may have.
On the other hand, if the baby takes a bottle, the father usually collaborates more at night taking turns feeding him. A good advice is to prepare them and leave them ready before bedtime, so you will gain minutes of sleep and avoid mistakes at the time of preparation.
They sleep poorly since pregnancy
Another argument that subtracts hours and quality of rest for mothers is that they have an advantage (in this case, a disadvantage) since pregnancy. They drag sleep deficit from before birth, it could be said that it is from the third quarter when the nights become more busy.
The size of the belly, the nocturnal excursions to the bathroom and not finding the position make it almost impossible to sleep a night of the pull during the final stage of pregnancy.
The parents sleep less hours
If it were concluded that mothers are the ones who sleep the least, most would agree. But a book that collects several studies says the opposite, that it is recent parents who least sleep
The book "The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years", by Tara Haelle and Emily Willingham, is based on the arguments of some studies conducted with couples during the first four years of their life as parents, which concludes that if we consider 24 hours a day, it is they who ended up sleeping less.
Most parents are going to work with less than 6 hours of sleep every night. And if you work away from home all day, you have no chance of recovering those hours of sleep. But the argument is halfway, since there are also many mothers who work away from home without being able to recover lost hours. And those who stay at home, as we said before, cannot always take a nap.
So who sleeps less? Mothers sleep worse, with a more fragmented and little restful sleep, while fathers sleep less hours but more often.Who sleeps less is not important
But anyway, it is not a competition about how many hours one or the other sleeps, or who sleeps worse. It's something that You cannot generalize, since each couple is a world and everyone has their own personal circumstances.
In some cases it will be he who sleeps the most, in others she, and in others (which would be ideal) an agreement will be reached to ensure that both can sleep more or less the same amount of hours.
The important thing is that both take equal responsibility to care for the baby at night. And if the mother breastfeeds, the father compensates him by collaborating in another way, for example, taking care of the baby during the day so that she can rest. Who sleeps less at home?
The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years
Today in Amazon for € 20.73
