The Walking Dead: New Parents

I went back to work when my daughter was 7 months old.  Even though I had taught psychology for a long time, the lack of sleep made it hard for me to remember even basic things.  Once I was lecturing on Piaget's stages and for a good 10 seconds I had to stall because instead of the names of the stages all I had in my head was this.  Eventually I remembered the stages; but I have never forgotten that moment.

So this week's blog is dedicated to all of the new parents out there...

First, is this plotting baby correct?  Yes - for the near future.  Newborn babies wake to eat every two or three hours - so in a given night the parents might be awakened four or more times!  A study by McDaniel and Teti (2012) found that one-month old babies wake two to three times each night and three month old babies still wake one to two times each night.  Babies this young require attention at night - to feed them, to soothe their gas pains, to change their diapers, to rock them - so if the baby is awake, that means that the parents aren't sleeping either.

So what is the problem?  Many studies including McDaniel and Teti's demonstrate that getting less sleep tends to go hand in hand with more clinical depression in new parents.  Most, but not all, find that this is especially true for new mothers who are more likely than new fathers to lose sleep caring for Baby's nighttime needs.  We can't be sure that it is only the loss of sleep that is causing the depression; but a positive correlation like this means that it's common to see these two things happening at the same time.

McDaniel and Teti also looked at how lack of sleep might relate to parents' perceptions of each other as parents.  This is important because, "...supportive coparenting, such as when partners endorse and support each others' parenting behaviors and cooperate with each other in raising their children, has been linked to increased relationship quality, less depression, and less parenting stress (p. 886)."  So if parents do not feel like they are a team, that also seems to go hand in hand with depression.

To unravel this riddle, the researchers used data from Project SIESTA (Study of Infants' Emergent Sleep TrAjectories) that included how 132 new parent (heterosexual) couples responded to a questionnaire about coparenting.  The parents rated themselves on how much they agree about parenting, how close they feel to each other and if they fight in front of their baby, their feelings of competition as parents, and how fairly they share the tasks of parenting.  This questionnaire, a measure of parents' depressive symptoms, and reports on their babies' nighttime wakings were collected when the infants were one month old and three months old.

Using a statistical method, McDaniel and Teti were able to determine how these things are related.  Put simply: between one month and three months, babies sleeping less predicted parents sleeping less; parents sleeping less predicted more depression symptoms; more depression symptoms predicted feeling worse about how coparenting is going.  This flow remained the same regardless of the family's social class and the baby's level of fussiness - so even well-off, well-educated families with easy-going babies were likely to show this pattern.

If this sounds miserable (and even more miserable for single parents doing it solo), you may be relieved to learn that most babies are able to sleep through the night by about six months.  Until then, there are some things that you can do to help your baby sleep and ways to make this sleep deprivation even a bit funny (see below) when you feel like a zombie parent.

Further Reading:

Get Your Baby to Sleep: Infant sleep suggestions from pediatrician, Dr. William Sears.  I like that he is clear:  each baby is an individual and each family has its own needs - so choose what feels right for you.

Adam Mansbach wrote a darkly humorous book for ADULTS who are suffering from child-induced sleep deprivation.  Its title and text does contain the F-word so don't click this or buy this book if it would be offensive to you.  Although it is meant to be funny, its angry and defeated tone is probably a good demonstration of depressive symptoms!

You can read the entire McDaniel and Teti (2012) paper here and find out more about Project SIESTA on Douglas Teti's homepage.