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.
Unfortunately, can't have that in a society that requires workers be mobile to chase wherever the next gig job appears. Can't form trust bonds with neighbors when you gotta move every few years.
You got two 'village' responses which I fully disagree with because a dozen reasons. The village is not going to help you change diapers, feed the children, or do anything except have the children play together.
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.
Historically, the village 100% changed diaper, feed your children, nursed and generally helped out. Aunts, cousins, parents, friends all pitched in in the community to care for children.
I have been to many places, in different cultures, and countries. Outside of blood relationships and church, I have not seen a villager change a diaper for another without compensation.
I’m not even sure the premise is correct, what other complaint is socially acceptable wrt kids than “im tired” its just what one says when parenting is feeling like a drag. Honesty when the kids are laughing and everything is going smoothly, no one is “tired”
> The village is not going to help you change diapers, feed the children, or do anything except have the children play together.
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.
I think it’s worth considering that these things are not binary and we’re all different in goals and approaches.
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.
> The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
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.
Maternity leave is 4 months where I live, with many women afraid to express their desire to have kids in their jobs fearing they would be fired. Daycare is prohibitively expensive. A good education too.
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.
> It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.
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.
>Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital".
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".
I feel your pain. Parenting is exhausting, especially the first two years or so. Hang in there, it gets a lot better. Lowering standards also helps (Does the house really need to be that clean? Does the toddler need a bath every day?)
Maybe counterintuitive, but I've found that having more kids actually makes some things easier.
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.
I was part of a verrry large family and wasn’t parentified, though it absolutely does happen.
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
I think older people who have more patience are supposed to help. We moved to America when we were young so my mom had raise my brother and I by herself, which was very hard coming from somewhere people live in multi-generational households. She had very little patience for it. But she and my dad have way more patience for my kids. My mom lived with us for a year and then my wife’s mom lived with us for a year while our youngest was 2-3. Then we moved 10 minutes from my parents. My middle child kept getting ear infections so he went to my parents’ house every day for two years. These days my boys (4 and 7) go to my parents’ house every weekend.
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.
Totally the opposite. Doing even just 3 hours of constant physical labor over a few weeks and my joints are aching, lost mobility in my right foot. Looking after kids is qualitatively easier.
Another part is that most modern parents are subject to predatory lending on a scale that would previously be unfathomable.
Even the ones who manage to understand and avoid the predatory lending are still subject to competing with everyone else's speculated future earnings. Mortgages in their modern form should absolutely be made illegal as they bid up land prices to the detriment of almost everybody.
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].
> "That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents."
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.
I didn’t see ages mentioned, but in the past, parents were probably 16-22 while today’s parents could be as old as 40+. The pieces work way better at those earlier ages, and aside from nutrition the ancient times let to more physically fit individuals. Hell, the average age of parents today might be the average lifespan of people back then.
Mothers in the ancient past started at age 16-22 (note that fathers' ages at first child were extremely variable depending on the ancient culture in question) but then kept going giving birth every few years until age 40+. (Or until they died from childbirth complications, famine, disease, etc.)
They didnt have to deal with negligence laws. Modern parents probably spend most of their time eliminating small tail end risk. Kids need way less supervision if you're not trying to six sigma survival rates.
That’s probably about how much I lost taking care of ours. She generally woke up twice to drink milk but I was still up for the first one. Loss of an hour sleep can still be brutal if its like 6.5 to 5.5 hours.
Possibly sleeping longer to make up for it? In the early days you might lose up to an hour per night feed but if you go to bed a little earlier and have a sleep in then you should hopefully be able to mitigate that two hour decrease.
Agreed, and extended families are getting smaller (which the article mentions as well). For most of my childhood I had my two siblings, one set of a grandparents, an auntie and four cousins all living on the same block. Babies are a bit harder to pass around between family members but the older children could easily be sent to play with their cousins/to spend some time with their grandparents after school and on weekends etc.
There's a huge difference between 7 hours of straight sleep which your body decides when to wake up from, and 7 hours of fragmented sleep which is constantly interrupted at the worst possible time. Every single night.
One secret that seems worth trying for everyone is to go to sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 3-4 AM.
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.
Agreed that being woken up is very stressful, but I suspect it's more the stress that's exhausting than the decrease in sleep itself. I'll share a personal anecdote: A few years back I had trouble sleeping, sometimes I'd wake up multiple times and spend 4 hours awake staring at the clock and only sleep 2 or 3. Eventually I figured that as long as I laid in bed and was somewhat relaxed, I could still function the next day, the actual sleep time didn't make that much of a difference. I also didn't drink coffee or take any stimulants to stay awake or anything like that. The problem went away when I moved out of the city after a year or so, some mild allergy I had went away as well. I'm not claiming it's scientific or anything, just sharing my experience.
Speaking as a working father and stay at home mom couple, our lives completely revolve around the baby’s needs for many months after birth. I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to try to support both a newborn and each other as a dual-earning family. But I do think our arrangement, including cosleeping, and her not needing to be at work early, has helped immensely overall with our sleep.
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.
Yes, but still... I agree that it seems likely that in preindustrial times, most people just went to bed at dark and got up at light. Depending on the season that might be 12 hours or more, so they possibly didn't actally sleep all that time, but they were probably just quietly in their homes/shelters even if they were awake.
> One study, for example, found that first-time mothers in Germany on average get an hour less of sleep per night in the first three months after their baby is born than they did pre-pregnancy. Fathers lose a third of an hour.
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.
The 9-5 is doing a major part of that comment. Irregular sleep isn’t the end of the world if you can sleep in and recover. Modern parents don’t get a chance to recover.
I spend a lot of time in the rural Philippines and I notice that locals out here don't sleep that well and it doesn't seem to bother them. They get up extremely early with the sun, roosters are crowing even before that, cats are fighting randomly through the night, storms kick up many nights in the area through the year, and then they sometimes stay up late singing karaoke, though most of the time they are in bed early.
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.
On studies showing napping increases lifespan and all the good things, a common complaint is that presence of naps is also an indicator of high socioeconomic status. This anecdote is a good counter to that!
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?
Sure, but consider the economic factors that go into it. How many extended families would be perfectly happy to live together, but are unable to even consider it in the first place because of what the costs for that sort of multigenerational housing would look like?
I would guess very few. The main problem with extended families is politics, not house size (which are multiples bigger than they used to be in the US).
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.
> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
Another reason to not have kids.
> Our ancestors may have simply had less practical need to sleep deeply in one continuous stretch. "They would not have had the pressure of having to work a nine-to-five or an eight-to-five job that required them to get a certain amount of sleep during the night to be able to function the next day and to function safely," Ball says. "They weren't driving cars. They weren't operating heavy machinery. The kinds of things that matter to us just simply wouldn't have been issues."
> On average, the German study, which looked at nearly 40,000 people in total, found that parents who had at least one child under six years old reported sleeping about seven hours per night. Non-parents received just 10 minutes more sleep per night, for women, and 14 minutes more per night, for men.
I'll trade 15 minutes of sleep for a lifetime of joy, thank you :)
Not sure where are those lucky ones, but I've met half a dozen parents that became literal zombies during the first years because of a lack of sleep. From what they've reported, 2 hours is a lucky night. It does get better later on, after 2(!) years.
My neighbors' first kid had colic and they said the baby slept for at most 20 minutes at a time the first year.
So yea I imagine that'll turn you into a zombie.
They also said after a year they got a tip about a chiropractor (IIRC), went there and after 5 minutes the colic was gone. A real mix of emotions they said...
Both of my kids woke up their mom 2 to 4 times at night to feed for at least a year. One was a terrible sleeper, only 8 hours max per night, he still basically goes to sleep when the adults do and wakes up when the adults wake up. Sometimes before.
None of your kids had colic? Every caretaker (experienced parents) that tried to releive us completely lost their mind within hours. And it never ends, for months.
>> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
>Another reason to not have kids.
I was working nights before my kiddo came along, and I cant tell whether it was working in another timezone that ruined my sleep or he did. Either way, its not likely to ever come back.
It's not the actual sleep.
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.
>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 mean, we COULD just yield our kids to be raised by the state in pens by minimum-wage strangers and/or robots, I guess…
I can't tell if you're hyperbolizing the idea of community, or describing schooling.
We been doin that
Unfortunately, can't have that in a society that requires workers be mobile to chase wherever the next gig job appears. Can't form trust bonds with neighbors when you gotta move every few years.
"It takes a village"
You got two 'village' responses which I fully disagree with because a dozen reasons. The village is not going to help you change diapers, feed the children, or do anything except have the children play together.
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.
Historically, the village 100% changed diaper, feed your children, nursed and generally helped out. Aunts, cousins, parents, friends all pitched in in the community to care for children.
I have been to many places, in different cultures, and countries. Outside of blood relationships and church, I have not seen a villager change a diaper for another without compensation.
You weren’t alive before industrial society.
It's not free labor, it's a community effort, and the compensation goes both ways in a village!
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.
I’m not even sure the premise is correct, what other complaint is socially acceptable wrt kids than “im tired” its just what one says when parenting is feeling like a drag. Honesty when the kids are laughing and everything is going smoothly, no one is “tired”
> The village is not going to help you change diapers, feed the children, or do anything except have the children play together.
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.
Some villages absolutely help change diapers in 2026.
It's not in the cards for everyone.
I think it’s worth considering that these things are not binary and we’re all different in goals and approaches.
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.
> The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.
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 don't produce capital for the elites.
Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital". It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.
Maternity leave is 4 months where I live, with many women afraid to express their desire to have kids in their jobs fearing they would be fired. Daycare is prohibitively expensive. A good education too.
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.
Have you ever seen an "elite" think beyond the edge of the quarter? Lords of the Ashes all.
> It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.
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.
>Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital".
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".
I feel your pain. Parenting is exhausting, especially the first two years or so. Hang in there, it gets a lot better. Lowering standards also helps (Does the house really need to be that clean? Does the toddler need a bath every day?)
Our doctor told us not to give the baby/toddler a bath every day. Didn’t need to tell me twice.
(Every second day is fine, and better for their skin.)
We’d bath twice a week or with a blowout. Our kids are still alive
The strange thing is the infant years seem tiring in a different and more tolerable way than when they are interactive and running all over the place.
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.
Maybe counterintuitive, but I've found that having more kids actually makes some things easier.
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.
Great, so 5 more years of exhaustion lol
Nothing gets easier in life, you just get better.
Yes. My boys keep each other occupied at home and don’t ask to play with us at all.
Isn’t that just parentifying one or more of your children and passing it off as a solution because it’s easier for you?
Not always, Children always wanting an adult to run a circus for them also doesn't let them discover creativity through bordeom.
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.
Yes that is how families functions, older take care of the younger to balance the load. The parent isnt a slave, everyone helps out once they're able.
I was part of a verrry large family and wasn’t parentified, though it absolutely does happen.
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
I think older people who have more patience are supposed to help. We moved to America when we were young so my mom had raise my brother and I by herself, which was very hard coming from somewhere people live in multi-generational households. She had very little patience for it. But she and my dad have way more patience for my kids. My mom lived with us for a year and then my wife’s mom lived with us for a year while our youngest was 2-3. Then we moved 10 minutes from my parents. My middle child kept getting ear infections so he went to my parents’ house every day for two years. These days my boys (4 and 7) go to my parents’ house every weekend.
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.
Sounds like they're young. It gets way easier, and much more fun. Hang in there.
Totally the opposite. Doing even just 3 hours of constant physical labor over a few weeks and my joints are aching, lost mobility in my right foot. Looking after kids is qualitatively easier.
Another part is that most modern parents are subject to predatory lending on a scale that would previously be unfathomable.
Even the ones who manage to understand and avoid the predatory lending are still subject to competing with everyone else's speculated future earnings. Mortgages in their modern form should absolutely be made illegal as they bid up land prices to the detriment of almost everybody.
This completely misses a few large points.
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...
No reason for “parents” to be tacked on to this at all i reckon.
> "That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents."
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.
I didn’t see ages mentioned, but in the past, parents were probably 16-22 while today’s parents could be as old as 40+. The pieces work way better at those earlier ages, and aside from nutrition the ancient times let to more physically fit individuals. Hell, the average age of parents today might be the average lifespan of people back then.
Mothers in the ancient past started at age 16-22 (note that fathers' ages at first child were extremely variable depending on the ancient culture in question) but then kept going giving birth every few years until age 40+. (Or until they died from childbirth complications, famine, disease, etc.)
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...
They didnt have to deal with negligence laws. Modern parents probably spend most of their time eliminating small tail end risk. Kids need way less supervision if you're not trying to six sigma survival rates.
They report an hour less than average sleep time the first 3 months?!
How did get so lucky?
That’s probably about how much I lost taking care of ours. She generally woke up twice to drink milk but I was still up for the first one. Loss of an hour sleep can still be brutal if its like 6.5 to 5.5 hours.
Possibly sleeping longer to make up for it? In the early days you might lose up to an hour per night feed but if you go to bed a little earlier and have a sleep in then you should hopefully be able to mitigate that two hour decrease.
Because modern parents don't live near their extended family
Agreed, and extended families are getting smaller (which the article mentions as well). For most of my childhood I had my two siblings, one set of a grandparents, an auntie and four cousins all living on the same block. Babies are a bit harder to pass around between family members but the older children could easily be sent to play with their cousins/to spend some time with their grandparents after school and on weekends etc.
There's a huge difference between 7 hours of straight sleep which your body decides when to wake up from, and 7 hours of fragmented sleep which is constantly interrupted at the worst possible time. Every single night.
One secret that seems worth trying for everyone is to go to sleep at 9 PM and wake up at 3-4 AM.
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.
Agreed that being woken up is very stressful, but I suspect it's more the stress that's exhausting than the decrease in sleep itself. I'll share a personal anecdote: A few years back I had trouble sleeping, sometimes I'd wake up multiple times and spend 4 hours awake staring at the clock and only sleep 2 or 3. Eventually I figured that as long as I laid in bed and was somewhat relaxed, I could still function the next day, the actual sleep time didn't make that much of a difference. I also didn't drink coffee or take any stimulants to stay awake or anything like that. The problem went away when I moved out of the city after a year or so, some mild allergy I had went away as well. I'm not claiming it's scientific or anything, just sharing my experience.
I was wondering how they knew how people felt in ancient society. They were just guessing.
Speaking as a working father and stay at home mom couple, our lives completely revolve around the baby’s needs for many months after birth. I can’t imagine how challenging it would be to try to support both a newborn and each other as a dual-earning family. But I do think our arrangement, including cosleeping, and her not needing to be at work early, has helped immensely overall with our sleep.
Is this a real question?
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.
> 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.
Mfw torches and lanterns exist
Yes, but still... I agree that it seems likely that in preindustrial times, most people just went to bed at dark and got up at light. Depending on the season that might be 12 hours or more, so they possibly didn't actally sleep all that time, but they were probably just quietly in their homes/shelters even if they were awake.
Yes, biphasic sleep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
> One study, for example, found that first-time mothers in Germany on average get an hour less of sleep per night in the first three months after their baby is born than they did pre-pregnancy. Fathers lose a third of an hour.
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.
According to the article:
"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.
To put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
The 9-5 is doing a major part of that comment. Irregular sleep isn’t the end of the world if you can sleep in and recover. Modern parents don’t get a chance to recover.
Or take a nap during the day while some of the others watch your kid...
When I work from home and have a bad night, a 20-30 minute power nap during the day does wonders.
To be fair, if you have other kids you don’t exactly get to just sleep in and recover either.
I spend a lot of time in the rural Philippines and I notice that locals out here don't sleep that well and it doesn't seem to bother them. They get up extremely early with the sun, roosters are crowing even before that, cats are fighting randomly through the night, storms kick up many nights in the area through the year, and then they sometimes stay up late singing karaoke, though most of the time they are in bed early.
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.
On studies showing napping increases lifespan and all the good things, a common complaint is that presence of naps is also an indicator of high socioeconomic status. This anecdote is a good counter to that!
> 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.
Yeah, a common thing in the Mediterranean as well. But unfortunately, capitalism does NOT like downtimes during "productive" daytime.
All the single-working parents I know don’t have this complaint. The dual-working couples do. Seems pretty straightforward.
Clearly my anecdotes do not apply to the rest of globe, just my observation.
Sure, likewise, if you live in a multi generational household, raising kids is a lot easier on average.
But most people cannot have those things in modern Euromerican nations
> multi generational household
> 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?
Sure, but consider the economic factors that go into it. How many extended families would be perfectly happy to live together, but are unable to even consider it in the first place because of what the costs for that sort of multigenerational housing would look like?
I would guess very few. The main problem with extended families is politics, not house size (which are multiples bigger than they used to be in the US).
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.
> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
Another reason to not have kids.
> Our ancestors may have simply had less practical need to sleep deeply in one continuous stretch. "They would not have had the pressure of having to work a nine-to-five or an eight-to-five job that required them to get a certain amount of sleep during the night to be able to function the next day and to function safely," Ball says. "They weren't driving cars. They weren't operating heavy machinery. The kinds of things that matter to us just simply wouldn't have been issues."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
> On average, the German study, which looked at nearly 40,000 people in total, found that parents who had at least one child under six years old reported sleeping about seven hours per night. Non-parents received just 10 minutes more sleep per night, for women, and 14 minutes more per night, for men.
I'll trade 15 minutes of sleep for a lifetime of joy, thank you :)
> on average
Not sure where are those lucky ones, but I've met half a dozen parents that became literal zombies during the first years because of a lack of sleep. From what they've reported, 2 hours is a lucky night. It does get better later on, after 2(!) years.
I have five children and find this very difficult to believe. Even the "worst" of it (age 0-3 months) was never anything close to that bad.
My neighbors' first kid had colic and they said the baby slept for at most 20 minutes at a time the first year.
So yea I imagine that'll turn you into a zombie.
They also said after a year they got a tip about a chiropractor (IIRC), went there and after 5 minutes the colic was gone. A real mix of emotions they said...
Both of my kids woke up their mom 2 to 4 times at night to feed for at least a year. One was a terrible sleeper, only 8 hours max per night, he still basically goes to sleep when the adults do and wakes up when the adults wake up. Sometimes before.
My second screamed every night for two years. It was fun.
None of your kids had colic? Every caretaker (experienced parents) that tried to releive us completely lost their mind within hours. And it never ends, for months.
A person's definition of a 'lifetime of joy' may exclude caring for children.
A lifetime is a long time. Much longer than children are children.
>> Although sleep duration increased after an all-time low at three months, neither parent had fully recovered their pre-pregnancy sleep after six years.
>Another reason to not have kids.
I was working nights before my kiddo came along, and I cant tell whether it was working in another timezone that ruined my sleep or he did. Either way, its not likely to ever come back.