Courtney Hill, 28, of Fort Washington, Maryland, is doing it all. All except sleeping, that is. Hill, mother of Zoe, 7 months, and Denver, 5 years, commutes 2 hours a day to Washington, D.C., to work as an office manager and gets up twice a night with Zoe, whose teething keeps both Mom and baby awake. Since her partner, Aaron, 33, an officer in the Navy, is stationed three hours away and preparing to ship out to Kuwait, "Mom isn't getting much sleep," says Hill.
Hill is hardly alone. A new mother loses 200 hours of sleep in the first year of her child's life, according to a recent poll by The National Sleep Foundation (NSF). The irony is that newborns can keep Mom awake while still getting 16 to 20 hours of shut-eye themselves. That's because infants rarely sleep more than a few hours at a time and don't differentiate between night and day, according to NSF research. This cycle of interrupted, insufficient sleep can leave women irritable, lethargic, and more prone to depression. What's more, it can affect a woman's ability to think through and perform even simple tasks. These are the months when the prospect of taking a shower seems akin to scaling Everest, the drama of "Barney" can produce tears, and folded laundry ends up in the refrigerator.
The fact that new moms are sleep-deprived is hardly news. "Every woman with a newborn goes through several months where sleep is terrible," says Meir H. Kryger, M.D., past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and author of the new book A Woman's Guide to Sleep Disorders.
But parental lifestyles have changed recently in ways that make getting a good night's rest even more challenging. For instance, 54 percent of women with children under age 1 now work outside the home. Increasing rates of breastfeeding mean that dads can't necessarily take a night shift during those early pre-bottle weeks. About a third of babies are born to single mothers, so there may not be someone else to take over when things get rough. Plus, work hours and commutes are longer than ever, leaving at-home moms with less help on hand.
While a new mom's sleep-deprivation can be extremely stressful, it's usually temporary. By 6 or 7 weeks, babies begin to spend more time sleeping at night than during the day; by 4 months they may sleep between five and eight hours at a stretch; and by 6 months they should settle into a pattern of a solid five to eight hours each night that, when not interrupted by teething, earaches, or other illnesses and discomforts, allows parents to get something resembling a normal night's sleep.
To keep you going until that point, BabyTalk interviewed some top sleep researchers and a few well-rested moms. Their proven and innovative approaches will surely help you get better sleep -- and more of it.
