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Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did
- irishcoffee 5mo agoAll the single-working parents I know don’t have this complaint. The dual-working couples do. Seems pretty straightforward. Clearly my anecdotes do not apply to the rest of globe, just my observation.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo ago[flagged]
- aprilthird2021 5mo agoSure, likewise, if you live in a multi generational household, raising kids is a lot easier on average. But most people cannot have those things in modern Euromerican nations
- 627467 5mo ago> multi generational household > most people cannot I dont know if "cannot" is the right verb here. I bet if you asked enough euromericans if they'd choose to live with extended family the answer would be "only in extreme and deprived circumstances". Isn't a common excuse for not having children that couples can't afford their own home?
- crooked-v 5mo agoSure, but consider the economic factors that go into it. How many extended families would be perfectly happy to live together, but are unable to even consider it in the first place because of what the costs for that sort of multigenerational housing would look like?
- lotsofpulp 5mo agoI would guess very few. The main problem with extended families is politics, not house size (which are multiples bigger than they used to be in the US). It is hard enough to run a household with two chiefs, but add more and you either need everyone to accept a hierarchy or split into different houses. Which is why it is almost only ever seen in places where individuals lack earning power.
- aprilthird2021 5mo agoFair enough for the first point. For the latter, there is some research towards that: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-fertility?page=1&perPage=50 https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-...
- ctxc 5mo agoThey report an hour less than average sleep time the first 3 months?! How did get so lucky?
- porknubbins 5mo agoThat’s probably about how much I lost taking care of ours. She generally woke up twice to drink milk but I was still up for the first one. Loss of an hour sleep can still be brutal if its like 6.5 to 5.5 hours.
- jamesfinlayson 5mo agoPossibly sleeping longer to make up for it? In the early days you might lose up to an hour per night feed but if you go to bed a little earlier and have a sleep in then you should hopefully be able to mitigate that two hour decrease.
- jonplackett 5mo ago> One study, for example, found that first-time mothers in Germany on average get an hour less of sleep per night in the first three months after their baby is born than they did pre-pregnancy. Fathers lose a third of an hour. Yeah but how many times were they woken up in the night? With a baby you might still get 8 hours total but you’re woken up 4 times a night which makes that sleep way less effective.
- rahidz 5mo agoAccording to the article: "It's not that modern parents are waking up more often. Work by Samson and others has found that people in hunter-gatherer societies usually wake more frequently through the night than we do." But I think there's a difference between waking up at night because your baby is crying, calming them down, going back to sleep, etc etc. when you have a 9-to-5 job, versus if you're a hunter-gatherer.
- MarkSweep 5mo agoTo put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
- jonplackett 5mo agoBiphasic sleep is a lot different to be woken up randomly by a child though.
- lumost 5mo agoThe 9-5 is doing a major part of that comment. Irregular sleep isn’t the end of the world if you can sleep in and recover. Modern parents don’t get a chance to recover.
- magicalhippo 5mo agoOr take a nap during the day while some of the others watch your kid... When I work from home and have a bad night, a 20-30 minute power nap during the day does wonders.
- wiseowise 5mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- andrepd 5mo ago> On average, the German study, which looked at nearly 40,000 people in total, found that parents who had at least one child under six years old reported sleeping about seven hours per night. Non-parents received just 10 minutes more sleep per night, for women, and 14 minutes more per night, for men. I'll trade 15 minutes of sleep for a lifetime of joy, thank you :)
- wiseowise 5mo ago> on average Not sure where are those lucky ones, but I've met half a dozen parents that became literal zombies during the first years because of a lack of sleep. From what they've reported, 2 hours is a lucky night. It does get better later on, after 2(!) years.
- cullumsmith 5mo agoI have five children and find this very difficult to believe. Even the "worst" of it (age 0-3 months) was never anything close to that bad.
- magicalhippo 5mo agoMy neighbors' first kid had colic and they said the baby slept for at most 20 minutes at a time the first year. So yea I imagine that'll turn you into a zombie. They also said after a year they got a tip about a chiropractor (IIRC), went there and after 5 minutes the colic was gone. A real mix of emotions they said...
- lotsofpulp 5mo agoBoth of my kids woke up their mom 2 to 4 times at night to feed for at least a year. One was a terrible sleeper, only 8 hours max per night, he still basically goes to sleep when the adults do and wakes up when the adults wake up. Sometimes before.
- pedalpete 5mo agoThis completely misses a few large points. 1) Though they are comparing parents specifically, without the baseline of what the hunter-gatherer groups sleep was like without children, are they comparing hunter-gatherer group to industrialized people? Or are they comparing parenting? 50% of people rate their sleep as an F, and another 21% a D grade [1]. That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents. 2) specifically in mothers, as motherhood has shifted later in life, the early years with young children are now often overlapping with perimenopause, so mothers are hit with the double whammy of sleep disruption. I blogged about this a few months ago [2] The study is still mostly focused on the antiquated idea that sleep duration is a predictor of sleep quality. The latest research shows sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep duration. I wrote about hot the Neural Function of Sleep dictates this [3]. Studies in shift workers (I can never find the link) shows regularity trumps duration for both subjective sleepiness and cognitive performance. The article does mention the increase in prolactin during breastfeeding, but the tiredness of parenting doesn't only last through the first year (apparently the average of breastfeeding in Australia is 6 months). The hunter-gatherer societies I'm sure breastfeed for longer periods. I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the co-founder of affectablesleep.com and we have a keen focus on parents of young children and specifically enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep, not sleep duration which everyone obsesses over [4]. [1] https://www.thensf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NSF_SIA_2025-Report_final.pdf https://www.thensf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NSF_SIA_20... [2] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/when-childrearing-meets-menopause https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/when-childrearing-meets-m... [3] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-doesnt-depend https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-... [4] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/try-telling-new-parents-to-get-more https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/try-telling-new-parents-t...
- bethekidyouwant 5mo agoNo reason for “parents” to be tacked on to this at all i reckon.
- swores 5mo ago> "That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents." This doesn't really mean anything for comparing parents with non-parents, since it's self-reported so "failing" could mean "missing several hours of needed sleep each night" to one person and "failing to hit higher-than-needed sleep target twice a week" to another.
- binary132 5mo agoSpeaking as a working father and stay at home mom couple, our lives completely revolve around the baby’s needs for many months after birth. I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to try to support both a newborn and each other as a dual-earning family. But I do think our arrangement, including cosleeping, and her not needing to be at work early, has helped immensely overall with our sleep.
- blindriver 5mo agoIs this a real question? Until the advent of electricity, when it was nighttime, it was mostly pitch black dark, and there was nothing you can really do except go to sleep. These days you're up a lot longer and there are more distractions like work and social media to keep you up well into the night. If you ever go camping with no cell phone signal, you'll go to sleep much earlier as well and get a lot more sleep than modern living.
- esseph 5mo ago> Until the advent of electricity, when it was nighttime, it was mostly pitch black dark, and there was nothing you can really do except go to sleep. Mfw torches and lanterns exist
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYes, but still... I agree that it seems likely that in preindustrial times, most people just went to bed at dark and got up at light. Depending on the season that might be 12 hours or more, so they possibly didn't actally sleep all that time, but they were probably just quietly in their homes/shelters even if they were awake.
- esseph 5mo agoYes, biphasic sleep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
- blindriver 5mo agoMFW you believe torches and lanterns are as bright and ubiquitous as electric lights today.
- tekla 5mo agoI don't think you quite understand how expensive lighting was until the last 60 years.
- adverbly 5mo agoIt's not the actual sleep. It's that parenting is exhausting. I could do physical labor for hours. Code straight for hours. But when I have to look after the 2 kids for 3 hours solo I'm totally exhausted. And I don't mean sit them in front of a TV - but actually try and feed them, change diapers, clean up after their messes, keep them entertained... Weekends are suddenly way more exhausting than weekdays. And then that compounds over weeks. It's totally exhausting. The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
- lotsofpulp 5mo ago>but I'm not sure what the alternative should be. A village where trusted neighbors and family members and a chain of kids in increasing ages can help look after each other.
- binary132 5mo agoI mean, we COULD just yield our kids to be raised by the state in pens by minimum-wage strangers and/or robots, I guess…
- remexre 5mo agoI can't tell if you're hyperbolizing the idea of community, or describing schooling.
- binary132 5mo agoNo need to apply critical or creative thought when the downvote button is right there. Go on, just give it a click and carry on with your day so we don’t have to think about the bad things.
- 6AA4FD 5mo agoWe been doin that
- mschuster91 5mo ago
- jleyank 5mo agoI didn’t see ages mentioned, but in the past, parents were probably 16-22 while today’s parents could be as old as 40+. The pieces work way better at those earlier ages, and aside from nutrition the ancient times let to more physically fit individuals. Hell, the average age of parents today might be the average lifespan of people back then.
- tetromino_ 5mo agoMothers in the ancient past started at age 16-22 (note that fathers' ages at first child were extremely variable depending on the ancient culture in question) but then kept going giving birth every few years until age 40+. (Or until they died from childbirth complications, famine, disease, etc.) Please take a look at the very thorough demographic analysis of the ancient peasant class at https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
- mothballed 5mo agoThey didnt have to deal with negligence laws. Modern parents probably spend most of their time eliminating small tail end risk. Kids need way less supervision if you're not trying to six sigma survival rates.
- jleyank 5mo agoI’m only ancient to the young, but I was out of the house with friends most summer days. Any of the moms, if home, could help us out with door or drink and I’m sure they watched a bit. There were a lot of kids 9n the row house blocks…
- brid 5mo agoBecause modern parents don't live near their extended family
- jamesfinlayson 5mo agoAgreed, and extended families are getting smaller (which the article mentions as well). For most of my childhood I had my two siblings, one set of a grandparents, an auntie and four cousins all living on the same block. Babies are a bit harder to pass around between family members but the older children could easily be sent to play with their cousins/to spend some time with their grandparents after school and on weekends etc.
- dlcarrier 5mo agoIn ancient times, parents probably… I was wondering how they knew how people felt in ancient society. They were just guessing.
- joaomoreno 5mo agoThere's a huge difference between 7 hours of straight sleep which your body decides when to wake up from, and 7 hours of fragmented sleep which is constantly interrupted at the worst possible time. Every single night.
- j45 5mo agoOne secret that seems worth trying for everyone is to go to sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 3-4 AM. Get a few hours before anyone wakes up, and the best uninterrupted sleep for the most part, and the sleep before midnight has a magnified and compounding effect. Also early morning is at least 2x as effective energy and clarity wise as late nights.
- doubled112 5mo agoI don't think this is the same for everybody. I've experimented with sleep schedules a few times. If I go to bed before I'm ready I will not sleep very much at all. Best for me is when I go to bed at roughly 1am and wake around 7am. If you want me awake at 3am, I will need to stay up that late. As I learned resetting myself after overnight shifts, no matter how early I go to bed, I will not be functional at that time.
- j45 5mo agoIt's very possible it's not the same for everyone. The circadian rythmn is universal though, and no human is really excluded from it. There might be a shift from it for some but verifying it is the important part to remove guesswork. It also seems the case that sleep adjustments, in any direction, don't happen over night. Consistency is the most important thing no matter what anyone does.
- dandellion 5mo agoAgreed that being woken up is very stressful, but I suspect it's more the stress that's exhausting than the decrease in sleep itself. I'll share a personal anecdote: A few years back I had trouble sleeping, sometimes I'd wake up multiple times and spend 4 hours awake staring at the clock and only sleep 2 or 3. Eventually I figured that as long as I laid in bed and was somewhat relaxed, I could still function the next day, the actual sleep time didn't make that much of a difference. I also didn't drink coffee or take any stimulants to stay awake or anything like that. The problem went away when I moved out of the city after a year or so, some mild allergy I had went away as well. I'm not claiming it's scientific or anything, just sharing my experience.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago> When Samson stayed with the Hadza, he described common parenting practices in the US, such as encouraging babies to sleep separately from their caregivers. "They looked at me like I was insane," says Samson. "They were like, 'Why? Why? Why?'… I felt bad almost asking the question." We had our twins sleep with us for about a year. They slept better, we slept better. During daytime naps, they slept in their own room and beds so that was not totally foreign to them when we switched them to sleeping there at night.