Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did

irishcoffee

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.

ctxc

They report an hour less than average sleep time the first 3 months?! How did get so lucky?

jonplackett

> 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.

wiseowise

> 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...

pedalpete

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...

binary132

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.

blindriver

Is 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.

adverbly

It'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.

jleyank

I 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.

brid

Because modern parents don't live near their extended family

dlcarrier

In ancient times, parents probably… I was wondering how they knew how people felt in ancient society. They were just guessing.

joaomoreno

There'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.

SoftTalker

> 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.