Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did
bbc.com
bbc.com
It's that parenting is exhausting.
I could do physical labor for hours. Code straight for hours.
But when I have to look after the 2 kids for 3 hours solo I'm totally exhausted. And I don't mean sit them in front of a TV - but actually try and feed them, change diapers, clean up after their messes, keep them entertained...
Weekends are suddenly way more exhausting than weekdays.
And then that compounds over weeks.
It's totally exhausting. The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
A village where trusted neighbors and family members and a chain of kids in increasing ages can help look after each other.
I do not find parenting that difficult because I parent differently.
The alternative: Teach them to entertain themselves. They clean up their own messes. I have the kiddos do tasks with me. Babies are easy enough, toddlers need limited stuff to do as it is all about novelty. Kids 5+ can learn to entertain themselves with their talents, siblings, neighbors.
Our friends would be at our place a couple days a week and at my parent's friend's place a couple days a week.
Sure if you're not pulling your share some other compensation would be expected.
In reality it would vary whole lot, not just in terms of time and place in a general sense, but also for individual families. If you had many relatives nearby, perhaps, but in some cases you might not, or you might actually have to be taking care of not just your children but also your parents-in-law who are disabled and your aunt who is mentally unstable partially due to her own husband and children dying in the famine a couple years back.
And maybe you are also poor so you need to work land that isn't even your own, in addition to your own (maybe rented) plot, and you are socially shunned on top of that and your neighbors sure as hell aren't going to help out with your own children. But at least you only have two kids now since two died and you managed to give another away to live his whole life in a monastery.
The (literal) village did all of these things for my grandparents when they were raising my parents. Everyone’s kids were almost everyone else’s kids, fed by whoever, whenever. Few, if any vehicles to worry about, so lots of groups of kids wandering about after the initial toddler stage.
It's not in the cards for everyone.
Personally, we ended up living where my wife grew up and about an half hour from my fold, and were really social in the community. For my kids, that meant lots of cousins for the kids and a pretty rich social life for us. Lots of little league and community events. Folks didn’t change the diapers, but they had our backs in a thousand ways.
My sister and her husband live in a mega city a few hundred miles away. They are doing great, but they are doing it on their own. I think it’s harder on their kids in some ways, but they are doing fine.
IMO, “the village” is a better way to live and brings a lot to the table. But there’s no one answer.
It's by design. Kids don't produce capital for the elites. We peasants aren't supposed to have kids, just waste away grinding so that those in power can accumulate more power, because they can pay others and have as many kids as they want, but we from the middle class will struggle with one or two. It's a form of indirect classist populational control enforced by purchase power.
Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital". It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.
Sure they grow up to join the workforce eventually, but 16-18 years doesn't show up in the quarterly reports, so the elites don't like it. I could be wrong, most likely am, but that's what I see and that's what these hostile practices represent.
Why? The elites bank on AI and robots doing everything in the future. The plebs have no place in the visions of Musk, Thiel, Altman and the rest of the wankers.
They can grow up in third-world countries where elites don't have to spend a dime. Then they lobby to import them by the millions to "start producing capital".
(Every second day is fine, and better for their skin.)
The babies being potatoes phase if visiting my life again would benefit from transferable skills that you simply don't have as the first time parent.
With 4+ children, the kids almost never come to us for entertainment. They form their own little society and find tons of ways to play and interact with each other. The little ones are just as likely to ask one of their older siblings to read them a story as they are to ask a parent, for example.
Sure, things like laundry and meals always have toil that increases with family size, but kids can start helping with such things after age 7 or so.
ids who are of a similar age can be guided to have activities they enjoy playing togeter.
Parentification is having to be responsible for the feelings and actions of an adult.
I mean I didn’t want to play with mom, I wanted to run around in the cornfield with my brothers and play capture the flag or something. And having a chore schedule isn’t parentification.
The closest would be the oldest watching the youngers while mom & dad go on a date, but I mean we just put a movie on and there are pretty clear expectations around everything. No different than hiring a local teenager (who you know through a local family) to do brief childcare.
Parentification in my mind has to cross a line where one kid is kind of forced to always have to be responsible for raising the other kid. Like if your parents are really deadbeat and one kid actually takes responsibility.
A lot of people don't really get big families, which makes sense. You just have a different definition of “normal” for certain things because big families just HAVE to operate differently in a lot of ways, and a lot of norms we expect are products of living a specific way in your formative years. That’s just different, not necessarily bad
Sometimes a kid has to wash dishes. Other times he has to read his kid brother a bedtime story. I promise, they'll survive. They might even be better off as adults, being well-accustomed to small acts of charity and self-denial.
I took care of my sister when I was 7 and she was 3 because both parents worked all day.
I don’t think younger people are wired to be taking care of babies full time. I’d imagine in nature they’d be out hunting or gathering and our attention spans are wired for doing that.
For us (my partner and I) these discussions dovetail into discussions about community. Like, so much about modern, suburban, nuclear family stuff is really isolating for everyone involved. We don't know exactly where to go from here, but looking at the declining fertility rate, it does seem unsustainable.
Another part is that most modern parents are subject to predatory lending on a scale that would previously be unfathomable.
We just integrated the kids into our existing lives.
1) Though they are comparing parents specifically, without the baseline of what the hunter-gatherer groups sleep was like without children, are they comparing hunter-gatherer group to industrialized people? Or are they comparing parenting?
50% of people rate their sleep as an F, and another 21% a D grade [1]. That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents.
2) specifically in mothers, as motherhood has shifted later in life, the early years with young children are now often overlapping with perimenopause, so mothers are hit with the double whammy of sleep disruption. I blogged about this a few months ago [2]
The study is still mostly focused on the antiquated idea that sleep duration is a predictor of sleep quality. The latest research shows sleep regularity is a better predictor of morbidity than sleep duration. I wrote about hot the Neural Function of Sleep dictates this [3]. Studies in shift workers (I can never find the link) shows regularity trumps duration for both subjective sleepiness and cognitive performance.
The article does mention the increase in prolactin during breastfeeding, but the tiredness of parenting doesn't only last through the first year (apparently the average of breastfeeding in Australia is 6 months). The hunter-gatherer societies I'm sure breastfeed for longer periods.
I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the co-founder of affectablesleep.com and we have a keen focus on parents of young children and specifically enhancing the Neural Function of Sleep, not sleep duration which everyone obsesses over [4].
[1] https://www.thensf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/NSF_SIA_20...
[2] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/when-childrearing-meets-m...
[3] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/the-hidden-work-of-sleep-...
[4] https://blog.affectablesleep.com/p/try-telling-new-parents-t...
This doesn't really mean anything for comparing parents with non-parents, since it's self-reported so "failing" could mean "missing several hours of needed sleep each night" to one person and "failing to hit higher-than-needed sleep target twice a week" to another.
Please take a look at the very thorough demographic analysis of the ancient peasant class at https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
How did get so lucky?
Until the advent of electricity, when it was nighttime, it was mostly pitch black dark, and there was nothing you can really do except go to sleep. These days you're up a lot longer and there are more distractions like work and social media to keep you up well into the night. If you ever go camping with no cell phone signal, you'll go to sleep much earlier as well and get a lot more sleep than modern living.
Mfw torches and lanterns exist
We had our twins sleep with us for about a year. They slept better, we slept better. During daytime naps, they slept in their own room and beds so that was not totally foreign to them when we switched them to sleeping there at night.
In ancient times, parents probably…
Get a few hours before anyone wakes up, and the best uninterrupted sleep for the most part, and the sleep before midnight has a magnified and compounding effect.
Also early morning is at least 2x as effective energy and clarity wise as late nights.
I've experimented with sleep schedules a few times. If I go to bed before I'm ready I will not sleep very much at all. Best for me is when I go to bed at roughly 1am and wake around 7am. If you want me awake at 3am, I will need to stay up that late. As I learned resetting myself after overnight shifts, no matter how early I go to bed, I will not be functional at that time.
It also seems the case that sleep adjustments, in any direction, don't happen over night.
Consistency is the most important thing no matter what anyone does.
Yeah but how many times were they woken up in the night?
With a baby you might still get 8 hours total but you’re woken up 4 times a night which makes that sleep way less effective.
"It's not that modern parents are waking up more often. Work by Samson and others has found that people in hunter-gatherer societies usually wake more frequently through the night than we do."
But I think there's a difference between waking up at night because your baby is crying, calming them down, going back to sleep, etc etc. when you have a 9-to-5 job, versus if you're a hunter-gatherer.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
When I work from home and have a bad night, a 20-30 minute power nap during the day does wonders.
In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work.
It put my own sleep issues in perspective, I realized I had been a little too precious about it and I can indeed do fine on more fractured sleep. Often I form a judgment in the morning about my sleep and if I feel bad about it, I carry that through the day. I'm more convinced now it's a psychosomatic thing, I'm convincing myself I should be tired! So I try not to do that now and think of the people out here who live every day like this.
Yeah, a common thing in the Mediterranean as well. But unfortunately, capitalism does NOT like downtimes during "productive" daytime.
Clearly my anecdotes do not apply to the rest of globe, just my observation.
But most people cannot have those things in modern Euromerican nations
> most people cannot
I dont know if "cannot" is the right verb here. I bet if you asked enough euromericans if they'd choose to live with extended family the answer would be "only in extreme and deprived circumstances".
Isn't a common excuse for not having children that couples can't afford their own home?
It is hard enough to run a household with two chiefs, but add more and you either need everyone to accept a hierarchy or split into different houses. Which is why it is almost only ever seen in places where individuals lack earning power.
For the latter, there is some research towards that: https://www.nber.org/digest/feb12/impact-real-estate-market-...