Moms Lose Up To 9 Hours Of Sleep Every Week

Here's another reason to take a minute to appreciate everything your mom's sacrificed for you this Mother's Day: Her sleep.  Not that anyone who’s paced the hallway trying to sooth a crying infant needs proof, but several studies have documented that new parents and parents of young children miss out on a whole lot of sleep. Now, a new population-level research in Australian quantified just how much sleep working Aussie parents are missing out on, compared to their colleagues without children. The results of the survey indicated that fathers of young kids are missing out on one to four hours of sleep each week, while mothers of young kids are missing out on three to nine hours of sleep each week. Many parents are sleeping less than the 49 hours per week recommended by the National Sleep Foundation guidelines, said the report’s co-author Francisco Perales, a research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland in Australia. "The situation was particularly alarming for mothers and fathers of two or three young children who incur a weekly sleep debt of two to seven hours," he told HuffPost. Also important was the finding that parents’ -- and particularly mothers’ -- sleep only started to recover (both quantity of sleep and quality of sleep) around the time the youngest child turned four, Perales said. “Others would argue that it is the woman’s biological imperative to breastfeed that is to blam...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news