You’ve probably already heard it all if your child: doesn’t sleep in his own bed, wakes up absolutely furious every 45 minutes overnight, is up past 10:30 p.m. giving off Big Drunk Energy, stands at the foot of your bed silently at 2 a.m. like a serial killer, is awake for the day at 4 a.m. with unhinged vivacity, or some absolutely mind-numbing, soul-crushing combination of all of the above.
Surely, if you find yourself among the ranks of zombie parents, you’ve researched or been offered tips on bedtime routines, white noise, sleep training and co-sleeping. Not to mention receiving comments like, “Have you tried just putting him down?” “They’ll grow out of it,” and, “You’ll miss this some day.” (Will I, Brenda??)
There’s no shortage of advice out there for the perpetually sleep-deprived parent. The topic of sleep saturates social media, parenting forums and everyday conversations as desperate moms, dads and caregivers seek out tips, commiseration, and help.
“Please give me hope it will get better. I’m at the end of my rope, honestly,” a parent recently wrote on Reddit, saying her four-year-old has never once slept through the night.
Some may be wondering if it’s always been this hard, or if it’s just today’s parents that are so “exhausted, burned out, and perpetually behind,” as the U.S. surgeon general recently put it.
While parent sleep deprivation isn’t new, some experts note several modern issues — like information overload and intense parental pressures — may be both amplifying and exacerbating the problem.
A new sleep study in the journal Neuroscience looked at how brain function is affected by sleeping for shorter times at night and suggested there was slightly lower cognitive function across the board for people who sleep less than six hours each night.
There’s pressure on today’s parents, thanks in part to the parenting industry and social media, to be “all things in all ways all the time,” said Vanessa Lapointe, a registered psychologist and parenting consultant based in Surrey, B.C., and the author of Parenting Right From the Start.
Lapointe says she has at least one parent session a day where sleep-deprivation comes up, and describes those parents as frazzled, on their last nerve, and more emotionally reactive to their children due to their exhaustion.
“They’re really struggling to hold it together as a human, never mind as a parent,” she said.
Is it really that bad?
While no study exists to say how terrible parental sleep is today compared to yesteryear, there are plenty of signs it isn’t good.
In August, the U.S. surgeon general issued a public health advisory about the impact of modern stresses on parents’ mental health. What Vivek Murthy called “the common demands of parenting,” including sleep deprivation, can contribute to parental stress, he noted.
But how bad is it? A 2019 study in the journal Sleep found that it can take six years for parental sleep satisfaction and duration to “fully recover” after the birth of a child.
Last year, researchers found that disrupted sleep in parents and disrupted sleep in children are each correlated with increased stress in parents. Another 2022 study found that the mental health of new and established parents was predicted by sleep, and not by physical activity.
“Not only do parents see their sleep diminished and fragmented, but there is also the stress of potentially being woken up at any time, much like health-care workers or first responders. When we are attentive and alert at night, our sleep is less restful,” explains the Canadian Public Health Campaign on Sleep in a report on parent sleep.
Some Canadian doctors are urging caution as a new study shows more teens and kids are taking melatonin to help them sleep. Many are using it long-term, but there is limited research on its safety for adolescents.
Meanwhile, sleep-deprivation in general, not just in parents, has been correlated with lower cognitive functioning. The American Heart Association says poor sleep may put you at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, cognitive decline, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and obesity.
Parisa Rostami, 36, who lives in Ottawa, says her four-year-old son has been crawling into her bed in the middle of the night for his entire life. And while she’s gotten used to the disruptions of trying to sleep next to a restless child with frequent wake-ups, she says it’s gotten so much worse since Bennett started school.
“I’m a mess,” said Rostami, a social worker in pediatric oncology at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.
“I am physically exhausted, nausea, headaches, feel sluggish. I am on the verge of tears, forgetting tasks at work, and have such little patience by the evening.”
Lapointe says she spoke to a mother this week who had to take an entire year off work because she was teetering on the edge of burnout from working long hours during the day and then being up at night with her three year old.
“She was so egregiously sleep deprived that she just couldn’t function. She couldn’t find words. She wasn’t able to think properly,” Lapointe said.
Is this a new problem?
It’s hard to find good Canadian data on children and sleep, and most studies worldwide rely on reports from parents, cautions Wendy Hall, a registered nurse and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who researches the effects of behavioural sleep problems on children and their parents.
Still, from the data that is available, Hall says many parents — as high as 20 or 30 per cent, in some studies — report their children have problematic sleep. Other studies have shown short sleep duration and night waking can persist well past infancy.
“I do think it is getting worse in spite of efforts by researchers like me and some clinicians about the importance of sleep,” Hall said.
Several modern issues may have exacerbated the problem, explained Hall. She points to electronic devices in children’s rooms as one example that disrupts sleep. And information overload may skew a parents’ view of what’s problematic, while also making it difficult for parents to sort through differing advice and tips to determine what’s actually valuable, she added.
“There is so much information flooding parents, particularly through social media,” Hall said. “A lot of it is not based on evidence and may just be based on one person’s experience with a single baby.”
On top of that, there’s what some researchers call the intensification of parenting. Data shows parents today spend more time with their children than in previous generations (even while more women are working full-time), and the predominant modern parenting style centres on acknowledging a child’s feelings — which has left many parents feeling burned out.
Plus, a lot has changed over the last century terms of night-time expectations. Some of the earliest parenting manuals warned “it is nothing short of wicked thus to spoil a child” by rocking, singing, or patting them to sleep. Even Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote in his seminal manual Baby and Child Care that parents should “say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back.”
Still, tired parents aren’t a new phenomenon, and neither is wondering if children get enough sleep.
A historical analysis of sleep recommendations published in Pediatrics in 2012 found that sleep recommendations over the past century consistently exceeded actual sleep time by about 37 min, due to declines in both actual and recommended sleep over time.
“It seems that children have always ‘needed’ extra sleep, no matter how much sleep they were actually getting,” the authors wrote in a follow-up paper the next year.
Too much information
Smithsonian Magazine notes on its website that parents have been inventing places for babies to sleep throughout history. For instance, in the 1600s the Italians invented what was called an arcuccio; essentially a half barrel placed on the mother’s bed so she could breastfeed while co-sleeping, the magazine explains.
The child sleep product industry in the U.S. alone was worth an estimated $325 million USD per year, according to a 2017 report in Marketplace, and that didn’t even include the lucrative world of sleep consulting.
On social media, sleep expertise and consulting accounts like Taking Cara Babies, Sleepfull Baby and Hey Sleepy Baby have respectively 2.7 million, 767,000 and 510,000 followers.
Parents today have a less clear path thanks to the “fire hose” of information and advice out there about sleep, Lapointe said.
“They question themselves more, they’re more uncertain than ever about what they’re meant to be doing.”
The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends cutting screens out of the bedtime routine and trying more relaxing activities like stories, listening to calming music, or lying in bed with your child talking quietly about your day.
Rostami, the mom in Ottawa, says that when she’s up with Bennett in the night, she tries to remind herself she’s far from alone.
“So many parents are dealing with the same thing and going through the same stuff. It helps to have friends and supports who can validate it,” she said.