Parent Sleep Deprivation in the First Year: What Research Shows

If you are reading this at an odd hour with a baby asleep on you, or finally asleep somewhere else, this page is for you. New-parent tiredness gets talked about as a joke, but it’s a real, measurable change, and researchers have studied it in some detail. Knowing what’s typical can be oddly reassuring. It can also help you spot the point where “tired” has turned into something worth getting help for.

Everything here comes from published studies or from official health bodies (the American Academy of Pediatrics, the US National Institute of Mental Health, the CDC, the HHS Office on Women’s Health and the NHS). It isn’t medical advice, and if something here worries you, your own doctor, midwife or health visitor is the right next step.

How much sleep do new parents actually lose?

The largest long-term look at this comes from Richter, Krämer, Tang, Montgomery-Downs and Lemola, published in the journal SLEEP in 2019. They used data from a big, population-representative household panel study in Germany, in which people answer questions about their lives, including how long they sleep and how satisfied they are with their sleep, once a year. Between 2008 and 2015, 2,541 women and 2,118 men in the panel reported the birth of their first, second or third child, which let the researchers compare each person’s sleep before pregnancy with their sleep afterward.

Sleep dropped sharply with the birth and hit its lowest point in the first three months. Compared with before pregnancy:

A few other findings from the same study are worth knowing. Breastfeeding was linked to a slight extra drop in mothers’ sleep (about 0.72 points of satisfaction and 14 minutes of duration). And the things you might expect to protect sleep (being older, having a higher household income, or parenting as a couple rather than alone) were “unrelated, or only very weakly related” to better sleep.

Keep the method in mind. These are self-reported answers to a yearly survey question, not lab measurements, and they come from one country. An average of 62 minutes also hides a lot of variation. Some parents lose far more, some less. But the overall shape, a steep drop and a slow, incomplete climb back, is consistent with what many parents describe.

It isn’t only the hours. It’s the interruptions.

One surprising result from objective measurement is that total sleep time may not look as bad as it feels. In a 2010 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Montgomery-Downs and colleagues had mothers wear wrist actigraphs (movement-based sleep trackers used in research) continuously from postpartum weeks 2 to 16. Fifty mothers took part during weeks 2 to 13, and 24 during weeks 9 to 16.

Mothers’ night-time sleep averaged 7.2 hours and didn’t change significantly across those weeks. What changed was the quality. Sleep efficiency, the share of time in bed actually spent asleep, rose from 79.7% at week 2 to 90.2% at week 16, as sleep became less broken up. The authors concluded that although total sleep was “higher than expected,” it was “highly fragmented (similar to fragmenting sleep disorders) and inefficient.”

That fits the experience of many new parents. Seven hours in four pieces does not feel like seven hours. If you’ve wondered why you feel wrecked on what looks like a reasonable amount of sleep on paper, this is a big part of the answer.

Does the feeding method change this?

A common assumption is that formula feeding lets parents sleep more. A separate 2010 study by Montgomery-Downs and colleagues in Pediatrics compared mothers who were exclusively breastfeeding, exclusively formula feeding or doing both, during postpartum weeks 2 to 12. They found no differences between the groups in measured sleep time, sleep efficiency, fragmentation, or daytime sleepiness and fatigue. That doesn’t mean sharing feeds can’t help (more on that below), only that the feeding method on its own didn’t predict better sleep in that study.

Tired, or something more?

This is the part that matters most. Exhaustion and depression can look alike, and they can feed each other. Official descriptions of postpartum depression include sleep changes among the symptoms. The National Institute of Mental Health lists “difficulty sleeping (even when the baby is asleep), waking early in the morning, or oversleeping.” The NHS puts it plainly: “If you cannot sleep at night even when your baby is asleep or you feel tired all the time, these could be signs of postnatal depression.”

Research points the same way. A 2015 systematic review by Bhati and Richards looked at 13 observational studies and found “evidence of a strong relationship between sleep disturbance and postpartum depression.” The authors noted that the women studied were mostly educated, middle class, over 30 and White, and that studies measured sleep in different ways, so the picture isn’t complete. Observational studies also can’t tell which comes first. Either way, if your sleep and your mood are both going badly, that combination is worth mentioning to a professional.

It helps to know the difference between the “baby blues” and depression. NIMH describes the baby blues as “mild and short-lasting mood changes” in the first two weeks after birth. Mood changes, anxiety or unhappiness that are “severe or last longer than 2 weeks after childbirth may be signs of postpartum depression.” And it isn’t only mothers. The NHS notes that “fathers and partners can also have depression after having a baby.” NIMH adds that partners, family and friends are often the first to notice the signs.

When to talk to someone

Based on NIMH, the HHS Office on Women’s Health and the NHS, reach out to your doctor, midwife or health visitor if:

• Baby blues symptoms don’t go away after two weeks, or are very intense.
• You feel sad, hopeless, anxious, angry, guilty or worthless for more than two weeks.
• You can’t sleep even when your baby is asleep, or you feel tired all the time.
• You’re struggling with daily tasks or looking after yourself, including eating and bathing.
• You’ve stopped enjoying the things you normally enjoy, or you’re pulling away from people close to you.

The NHS also addresses a fear many parents carry quietly: “You may be scared that your baby will be taken away if you ask for help or share how you’re feeling, but this is very rare.” NIMH says that “with proper treatment, most women feel better and their symptoms improve.”

If you’re in the US: the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free, available 24/7, and staffed by professional counselors. Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262). For a crisis, call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline). In a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

If you’re in the UK: the NHS advises speaking to your GP, midwife or health visitor if you think you might have postnatal depression. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

Two real hazards when you’re this tired

Falling asleep with your baby on a sofa or armchair

This is the one safe-sleep warning that hits exhausted parents hardest, because it usually isn’t a choice. You sit down to feed at 3am, the room is warm, and your eyes close. The AAP’s 2022 safe-sleep policy is unusually blunt about it: “Couches and armchairs are extremely dangerous places for infants and should never be used for infant sleep.” It says sleeping on these surfaces puts infants “at extraordinarily high risk (with 22- to 67-fold increased risk)” for infant death.

The AAP is also realistic. It “acknowledges that parents frequently fall asleep while feeding the infant,” and says the evidence suggests “it is less hazardous to fall asleep with the infant in the adult bed than on a sofa or armchair.” That isn’t an endorsement of bed sharing, which the AAP does not recommend. It’s harm reduction for the moment you know you might nod off. HealthyChildren.org, the AAP’s site for parents, translates it into steps:

• If you bring your baby into your bed to feed or comfort them, put them back in their own sleep space before you go to sleep.
• If there’s any chance you might fall asleep with your baby in your bed, remove pillows, blankets, sheets and other soft items from around them first.

The AAP policy adds that because the risk of bed sharing appears higher the longer it lasts, if you do fall asleep while feeding in bed, move the baby back to a separate sleep surface “as soon as the parent awakens.”

One more line from the AAP is worth knowing. The risk of sleep-related death is “more than 10 times higher” for babies who bed share with someone who is fatigued or has taken medication or substances that make it harder to wake. Extreme tiredness itself counts as a risk factor, which is one more reason to keep the baby on a separate surface. The AAP notes that a crib or bassinet by your bed still lets you “feed, comfort, and respond” to your baby easily.

Driving while drowsy

The other hazard is the car. A CDC report on drowsy driving, drawing on survey data from 147,076 adults in 19 states and the District of Columbia, found that 4.2% had fallen asleep while driving at least once in the previous 30 days, and that people who usually slept 6 hours or less were more likely to report it. The report explains that even without falling asleep, “drowsiness slows reaction time, makes drivers less attentive, and impairs decision-making skills.” It adds that techniques to stay awake while driving, “such as turning up the radio, opening the window, and turning up the air conditioner, have not been found to be effective.”

That report wasn’t about parents specifically, but the mechanism is the same. If you’re running on broken sleep, it’s worth letting someone else drive when you can, or postponing a trip until you’ve rested.

What actually helps (according to people who study it)

There is no trick that gives you your old sleep back. But official guidance does have some practical suggestions, mostly from the NHS and the HHS Office on Women’s Health:

• Rest when the baby sleeps, at least some of the time. The NHS suggests setting an alarm if you’re worried about sleeping too long.
• Share the nights. If you have a partner and you’re formula feeding, the NHS suggests sharing feeds. If you’re breastfeeding, a partner can take nappy changes or morning dressing so you can go back to sleep, and once breastfeeding is well established, can occasionally give a bottle of expressed milk at night.
• Accept help. The NHS suggests asking a relative or friend to watch the baby while you nap. The Office on Women’s Health also recommends asking family and friends for help with responsibilities.
• Get outside. The NHS calls walking “one of the easiest forms of exercise” and suggests a walk with your baby every day.
• Remember it changes. In the NHS’s words, “the phase when your baby wakes several times a night will not last forever.” The Montgomery-Downs data show sleep becoming noticeably less fragmented over the first four months, even if full recovery takes much longer.

Where white noise fits

We make a white-noise player, so we should be honest about this. There is some evidence that steady sound can help some babies fall asleep, though the research is small and mixed. Our guide to whether white noise helps babies fall asleep faster goes through it study by study. If it helps your baby settle a little sooner, that can give you back a few minutes. It won’t fix the night feeds, the fragmentation or the years-long recovery described above, and no sound machine can.

If you do use one, keep the volume moderate and the speaker away from the crib, and consider a timer rather than playing it all night. Our guide on whether to run white noise all night covers that trade-off. hushnap’s timer fades the sound out at 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour, so you don’t have to get up to switch it off.

What we don’t know yet

• How sleep loss differs for parents of babies with colic, reflux or other health needs. The big studies report averages.
• Exactly how much of the long-term sleep change is caused by the child and how much by other things that shift in the same years, such as work, age and household routines. The German study used each person as their own comparison, which helps, but can’t rule everything out.
• Whether poor sleep leads to postpartum depression, depression leads to poor sleep, or both. The research shows a strong link but is mostly observational.
• How fathers’ and partners’ sleep changes when measured objectively. Much of the detailed work has focused on mothers.

What is clear is that feeling this tired is common, it does ease, and it’s never a failing to ask for help, for the night feeds or for your mood.