The plague of parental sleep deprivation
As a baby, my second child was a terrible sleeper.
First he had day-night confusion, a common but exhausting condition in which the baby sleeps during daylight hours and is alert and hungry all night, like a vampire. Then he settled into a schedule of waking up four or five times per night, always happy and excited, as though eager to find out what the rest of us were doing without him.
I spent his first year in a heavy haze of sleep deprivation, frequently fantasizing about injecting caffeine directly into my eyeballs. But this, I knew, was normal — I just had to wait out those early months, and then the baby would start sleeping and I would recover, if not my full faculties, then at least the ability to keep my eyes open for the duration of a day.
I am still waiting.
My little kid is three-and-a-half now. He goes to preschool. He is learning to write his name. He still takes hours to fall asleep, frequently wakes up in the middle of the night, and is often up for good at 5 am.
His difficulties are relatively common — up to 30 percent of children between 2 and 5, and 15 percent of school-aged kids, regularly have difficulty falling asleep or sleeping through the night, according to data from the National Sleep Foundation. That means that millions of American parents are lurching through our days like zombies, some of us going years without an uninterrupted night of rest.
There is a whole cottage industry devoted to children’s sleep, but much of it is focused on babies — I cannot, sadly, strap my three-year-old into a Snoo. Moreover, I am constantly bombarded by reminders of the devastating health effects of sleep deprivation, and by expert advice for better sleep that fails to account for the person in my life who likes to wake me up with headbutts.
To the extent that I can formulate coherent thoughts in my sleep-deprived state, I’ve begun to wonder why my child, and so many other children in America, are like this. Have children always been such terrible sleepers? And what, short of waiting for adolescence, can save the millions of parents who are fighting to stay awake right now?
In my effort to answer these questions, I talked to experts who changed my perspective on my kid’s sleep troubles. And I talked to other parents who reminded me that, as lonely as the world can feel at 4 in the morning, I’m not really alone.
As Wendy Wisner, a writer and mom of two, put it, “you need to start with the premise that this happens and it’s normal.”
A brief history of sleep
As it turns out, children of past centuries were not magically great sleepers. “The default circadian rhythms of the human species change over the course of a life cycle,” said Benjamin Reiss, a professor at Emory University and the author of the book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Babies, for example, need more sleep than adults, but it tends to be more fragmented.
Before the 19th century, families often slept all together in a single room, Reiss said. If a child woke up at night, a parent or other family member could respond relatively quickly, and then everyone could get back to sleep. Parents also didn’t have to deal with the added hurdle of separation anxiety, which can complicate efforts to get children to sleep in their own rooms. (We were once advised to put our older child to bed with a family photograph to ease anxiety. This did not work.)
Working-class people in pre-industrial times often lived in multigenerational households with many family members who could help out at night, said Jennifer Wright, author of Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them, and other history books. Wealthier people had hired help — lots of it.
Wet nurses often worked at night, allowing well-to-do mothers to sleep and recover from childbirth, Wright told me in an email: “But look, that wasn’t enough. By the 1700s people sent their children off for their infancy to live in houses with wet nurses so they could avoid doing diapers or listening to the baby cry. Jane Austen, for instance, was sent off to live in the village with the wet nurse for the first few years of her life.”
Schedules were also different before the 19th century, with much of children’s education and parents’ work taking place in or around the home, Reiss said. There was no need for everyone to be up and out of the house by a particular hour.
That changed with the Industrial Revolution, when adults, including many women, “were expected to work 14-hour days at a factory rather than laboring on their own rural land,” Wright said. Now parents needed to sleep on a schedule, and they needed their kids to get on one too. The solution, for some, was laudanum, a tincture of opium sometimes called “the poor child’s nurse.”
Giving your children opium does keep them quiet, but it can also be fatal, and the practice understandably fell out of favor. In its place came a raft of childrearing experts with advice on helping children sleep, Reiss said. At the same time, the increased wealth that came with industrialization meant larger homes, and the advent of separate bedrooms for parents and kids. Pediatricians began advising parents not to allow children to sleep in the parents’ bed, “because that will disrupt everybody’s sleep,” Reiss said.
This is, more or less, where we are today, with work and school running on strict schedules and parents stuck with the difficult task of getting children to comply.
As Wright put it, “something that may come as a surprise to modern parents who feel they are dealing with infant sleep terribly is that they’re probably dealing with it more actively than any other parents in history.”
Kids need sleep, even if they don’t want it
And yet, deal with it we must. Most parents have work, most kids have school, and we all need rest; 5–9 hours for adults and 9–10 hours for young children, according to Lynelle Schneeberg, a sleep psychologist and fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Many parents know well the consequences of sleep deprivation, which, Schneeberg told me, has been used as a method of torture. In addition to problems with memory and concentration, lack of sleep can also affect mood, increasing the risk of anxiety and depression and making us more irritable. I, for one, find that I have less patience for playing with my child in the daytime when I’ve been up with him all night — except when the game is hide-and-seek and he lets me hide in bed.
Wisner, the writer and mom, told me that her older child struggled to sleep until she was at least 10. She often took more than an hour to fall asleep, and needed a parent to lie in bed with her. Wisner slept either in the same bed or the same room with her children for many years to make night wakings easier, but still, “I was very exhausted,” she said. “It was really hard.”
Sleep deprivation in adults also increases the risk of a whole host of ailments, from high blood pressure to dementia. And when a child struggles to fall asleep, parents often lose the small amount of time they have to connect with each other or relax after a day of work and child care. “I’ve definitely seen parents in my clinical work who will say that bedtime is the worst and most stressful part of their day,” Sarah Honaker, a pediatric sleep psychologist at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, told me.
I’d long assumed that kids were relatively unscathed by their refusal to sleep. I considered bedtime a fundamentally adversarial situation: I wanted my kid to sleep so that I could do dishes/talk to my husband/watch Pluribus/go to bed myself, and my kid wanted to stay up all night and play. Nor did my preschooler show any obvious ill effects from his chaotic nocturnal schedule — after a night of fighting bedtime until 10 pm, he’d often wake up on his own before 6.
But talking to sleep experts made me rethink whether my child was really fine with his no-sleep lifestyle. Some children do need less sleep than average, but large deviations from the mean are rare, Schneeberg said. “Most kids who are sleep-deprived have some kind of daytime consequence.”
Those consequences can include difficulty learning and managing emotions, and even getting sick more frequently, Honaker said. She also described a vicious cycle: Children who have a hard time falling asleep lose the association between getting into bed and falling asleep, leading them to resist bedtime, which causes more conflict with parents and more stress around going to bed. “All of this makes it thus even harder for them to fall asleep,” Honaker said.
Hearing this, I thought about bedtimes with my kid. Sometimes he jumps out of his bed, and when I ask him to get back in, he moans, “I can’t!” Sometimes he stomps around the bedroom, threatening to wake up his older sibling. Sometimes he runs in circles. Sometimes he hits. We rarely get through a bedtime without threatening some kind of loss of privileges. This obviously sucks for me and my husband, but it’s clearly not fun for my kid either.
Maybe, I’ve started to think, we’re on the same team after all.
How to help everyone get some rest
Realizing that maybe my kid also wants more sleep doesn’t mean I know how to help him get it. We’re already doing the basics: no screens after dinner, consistent bedtime routine with reading, dark room, white noise. Most parents I know are already familiar with these tips, and yet many still struggle.
Honaker recommends being strategic about a child’s bedtime to coincide with their natural sleepiness — even if it means pushing bedtime a bit later. She also mentioned a strategy called “bedtime fading,” in which parents note the time when their child actually falls asleep after the nightly period of arguing, stomping, and recriminations, and then put the child to bed at that time. If the kid falls asleep successfully, parents can then start inching bedtime earlier again. The goal is to show the child what a smooth, stress-free bedtime can look like.
Schneeberg, meanwhile, talked about “sleep onset associations”: the objects, people, or circumstances that kids learn to rely on to fall asleep. Adults have these associations too — “you probably like one side of the bed,” she said. But when a child’s sleep association is a parent sitting with them, they’ll need that parent every time they wake up in the middle of the night.
To fix the problem, Schneeberg recommends “gradually tapering away from needing your parent” for sleep, and replacing parental presence with an independent sleep association, like a book, a toy, or a drawing pad.
Then there are larger-scale solutions. “Our society has promoted a very narrow conception of how we ought to arrange ourselves during sleep,” Reiss told me. “It’s that narrowness and inflexibility that I think is the problem.”
Reiss isn’t advocating that we all quit our jobs and homeschool our children (although plenty of people are advocating for just that on Instagram Reels, a platform perfectly calibrated for making parents feel bad about themselves in the middle of the night). However, he does believe there could be a role for intentional communities where school and work might take place closer to where people live, and where “some of the responsibilities of parenting can be distributed a little bit more broadly.”
Such communities haven’t entered the mainstream in the United States. But pandemic-era isolation and parental burnout have led to a renewed interest in community among many Americans. Gillian Morris recently wrote for the New York Times about an Oakland housing complex known as the Radish, where 20 adults and eight kids live in what sounds like a pretty enviable setup: “Once Phil and Kristen’s kids are asleep at 7 p.m., they can text one of their 18 friends next door, pass the baby monitor to whoever is home and head out. No babysitter, no preplanning — just an impromptu date night, like in the pre-baby days.”
“Any group that’s trying to think about communal living spaces is also thinking about sleep,” Reiss said.
Moving in with 18 friends isn’t actionable advice for most parents right now. My husband and I are more likely to work on our kid’s sleep associations than we are to explore communal living arrangements. Still, reporting this story did make me see myself less as my child’s enemy, trying to get him to do something boring and annoying every single night of his life, and more as a fellow resident of an imperfect society, trying to help us all adapt.
Wisner gave me a useful framework for thinking about kids’ sleep problems: “Knowing that it’s normal is very important,” she said. “That doesn’t mean like, it’s normal, so you have to put up with it.”
“It’s normal, but there are ways to make it better” feels like a helpful starting point for a lot of parenting struggles. But often the only way to internalize this message is to hear it from other people. Because when you’re up in the middle of the night, nothing feels normal, and nothing feels like it will ever get better.