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].
Speaking 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.
> 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.
"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.
The 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.
> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
Another reason to not have kids.
> Our ancestors may have simply had less practical need to sleep deeply in one continuous stretch. "They would not have had the pressure of having to work a nine-to-five or an eight-to-five job that required them to get a certain amount of sleep during the night to be able to function the next day and to function safely," Ball says. "They weren't driving cars. They weren't operating heavy machinery. The kinds of things that matter to us just simply wouldn't have been issues."
> 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 :)
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.
This 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_20...
[2] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/when-childrearing-meets-m...
[3] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-...
[4] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/try-telling-new-parents-t...
Speaking 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.
They report an hour less than average sleep time the first 3 months?!
How did get so lucky?
> 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.
According 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.
The 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.
To put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
All 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.
> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
Another reason to not have kids.
> Our ancestors may have simply had less practical need to sleep deeply in one continuous stretch. "They would not have had the pressure of having to work a nine-to-five or an eight-to-five job that required them to get a certain amount of sleep during the night to be able to function the next day and to function safely," Ball says. "They weren't driving cars. They weren't operating heavy machinery. The kinds of things that matter to us just simply wouldn't have been issues."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
> 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 :)
> 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.