Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did

Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did
bbc.com

How did get so lucky?

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.

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...