Parents might now be sleep deprived as first thought – study

Thursday 14th February 2013

Research conducted at the University of Madison, Wisconsin has found that the amount of sleep deprivation that parents experience could actually be quite minimal.

The study which has been published in American Journal of Epidemiology relied on data that was collected between 1989 and 2008 by the Wisconsin Sleep Cohort Study. The data contained how much sleep the participants had got, how sleepy they were during the day and how much nap time they had. To help them arrive at their findings they also factored in which participants had children and how many they had.

Their results found that each child under 2 years old were associated with 13 fewer minutes of parental sleep per 24 hour period. For children aged 2 to 5, parents had nine fewer minutes of sleep. And each child aged 6 to 18 years was associated with four fewer minutes of sleep. In general parents with younger children reported having less sleep than those with older. Parents with multiple children also suffered and their sleep was reduced too.

Tags: sleep study research parents babies

Category: Sleep Research

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