Whenever a pregnant friend of mine asks me for some advice as they enter motherhood, one thing comes to my mind immediately: sleep! Get all the sleep you can. Sleep in. Sleep early. Sleep often. Soak in every minute of those precious ZZZs because soon, they will be a distant dream. No one could have prepared me, a girl who loves her 8 hours, for what sleep deprivation feels like. I was in true misery.
One mom says that people like me, who might be on the fence about kids, need to seriously consider sleep changes. It’s a huge factor (and spoiler alert: it doesn’t really get that much better as they get older).
“If you’re on the fence about having children. I want to be really, really honest with you right now because I feel like people are not honest about sleep, and sleep is like one of the most important things in my life,” Marissa, mom to a two-year-old, began in her video.
She explains that, before she had her daughter, she and her husband thought they had a good plan worked out for sleeping, including night wakings.
“My assumption was the first year of her life would be tough, right? That we would start out by doing night wakes together. Over time, we would split them up, but we only … loosely talked about it right. You need to have that conversation now with your partner about what you guys would do handling overnights because not enough people are talking about it.”
She also warns that sleeping with kids is not linear. Their sleeping patterns ebb and flow. One night they sleep through the night like a rock and the next night, they’re up three or four times. Marissa has experienced this, and as new parents, you’re not really thinking that far down the line.
“So, these things still happen even as they get older, and they’re out of the baby stage. Something to think about, something to talk about, and seriously talk about it before you’re in it because there is so much resentment and anger that comes even when you’re splitting things as 50/50 as possible,” she said.
“There’s still like bad feelings that come with it. So, get comfortable talking about it, get comfortable talking about the division of labor in general, but that’s a whole other conversation. But yeah say goodbye to sleep guys because I’m doing the best I can.”
After her video gained traction, most people agreed with her. One user commented, “My husband did most of the nights. Men can handle less sleep biologically 😅”
Marissa made a follow-up video, extrapolating on this point and noting there is scientific evidence to back this up. Unfortunately, despite science being on mom’s side, society is not so kind.
“Most couples I know that are a male-female partnership, typically the woman does most of the night wakes, and that’s for a lot of reasons. Some of them good, some of them bad. I think that a lot of times women say, ‘Oh my husband doesn’t wake up, he’s a heavy sleeper.’ Okay, wake him up,” she said.
“That is how you start resenting your partner when you’re not even giving your partner a chance to do the equitable work. The other thing I see a lot, and I saw this a lot in my comments was people saying, ‘Oh I’m gonna stay at home mom or I work at home and my husband works outside of the home and so I do the nights because he has to go to work,’” she said.
This rationalizing doesn’t work for Marissa either.
“You have to be with a kid all day. You have to be with a toddler screaming at you all day. You have to be with multiple children potentially screaming at you all day. You need to drive them around town. You need to entertain them. You need to regulate your own emotions, and you need to be with them 24/7 from when they wake up to when they go to sleep and then overnight too. I’ve never understood that argument, and I think it’s kind of bullshit.”
Being a full-time stay-at-home mom is still working! A stay-at-home parent needs the same (if not more) sleep to have an effective and productive day.
“If you are overtired and disregulated, you’re not gonna be able to do well and it feels like you’re internally undervaluing your own work,” she said.
New research shows that not only do women need more sleep, but when they do not get enough sleep — their health suffers more than men. When women lose sleep they’re at higher risk for diabetes, heart disease, and depression. Researchers say these differences are mostly due to hormones, so imagine how vital sleep is for a postpartum mother.
