Supporting the sleep needs of the whole family

One of the biggest concerns of new parents is sleep. This often comes in the form of the question “How do I get my baby to sleep?”

Many parents find themselves bleary-eyed, tapping that very question into google at 2am, and the results are usually not that helpful. In general, most problems are not productively solved while sleep-deprived and desperate at 2am!

The sleep and nurture needs of babies are not compatible with the western industrial cultural norm of sleeping 8 consecutive hours at night. Trying to achieve what we have come to understand as optimum sleep by trying to fix our babies’ sleep and nurture needs often leads to frustration.

The question I am going to address instead in this blog post is: “How can we as parents support the sleep needs of the whole family?” [1]

Culturally specific sleep norms

“Adults need eight consecutive hours of sleep per night”.

Does this assertion sound familiar to you? It is a cultural assumption, deeply held in Western industrialised cultures, and enforced by both external structures such as workplaces and cultural norms such as the idea of resting during the day being labelled as ‘lazy’.

What is being described here is called ‘monophasic’ sleep and it is just one type of sleeping pattern, not morally superior or inherently more healthy than other kinds of sleep.

The three types of sleep patterns are:

Monophasic sleep: One big long sleep at night.

Biphasic sleep: Two sleeps across a 24 hour period. The two main examples of this are 1: Going to bed early, being awake for hours during the night, then going back to sleep or 2: Sleeping during the night and also having a nap at some point during the day.

Polyphasic sleep: Having multiple sleeps across a 24 hour period.

Click here for my source and more detail on sleep patterns.

Sleep and nurture needs of babies

Polyphasic sleep is the sleep pattern that is biologically normal for babies. The main reason for this is that they have little tummies and so need to wake up frequently to feed. But the nurture needs of babies during the night are not purely functional. They need love and care during the night just the same as they do during the day, including nappy-changes, cuddles, and maybe even playing.

Some babies even enjoy spending time with their caregivers during the night, just hanging out, not feeding or trying to go back to sleep. Maybe they like the quiet and lack of distractions.

In terms of hours of sleep required over a 24 hour period, according to the Raising Children Network, babies 0-3 months require 14-17 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period[2]. That is a three hour range! And it doesn’t even include the outliers — babies who need more sleep for whatever reason, and babies who could be described as ‘low sleep needs’ (for a comprehensive discussion of ‘low sleep needs’ babies, I highly recommend this post by Anna Cusack).

The reason this range is so important is because only your baby knows how much sleep they need. Consulting a sleep schedule can be helpful for some parents but it can send others into despair when their baby doesn’t comply. Similarly, you might find comparing your babies’ sleep tallies (or awake windows) to that of your friends’ babies who are the same age interesting or helpful, but it could also be a source of unnecessary angst.

Sleep needs of parents

The sleep needs of adults also vary. According to the Sleep Health Foundation, most adults (up to 64 years) need 7-9 hours of sleep, and some might only need as few as 6 or as many as 11.

Sleep inequity

Studies have shown that in families with one mother and one father, while having a baby affects sleep duration and quality for both parents, the mother loses significantly more sleep. This is one such study, from 2016.

This problem, known as the gender sleep gap, is huge in the first year of a child’s life, but remains up to at least four years after birth. The study linked above suggests the gender sleep gap is due to a combination of biological reasons (bodyfeeding/breastfeeding being the biggest one) and gendered expectations. As usual, it is not easy to disentangle those two factors.

Of course, this doesn’t just affect mother/father families. In most families that bodyfeed/breastfeed, this is the role of just one parent, who therefore has greater night-time care responsibilities which lead to less nighttime sleep. From the social expectations perspective, queer families can be affected by gender norms and expectations to a greater or lesser degree as well as more heteronormative families.

How to meet the sleep needs of the parents

Whether our families look queer from the outside or not, getting everyone’s sleep needs met can take a bit of queering. By queering I mean challenging social norms.

This means busting sleep inequity, to avoid the gender norm in which there is a default parent[3] who tends to the baby for every single night waking and another parent who sleeps through as if nothing has changed.

But it also might not look like splitting care tasks straight down the line, 50/50, because that might not work either.

Maybe a bodyfeeding/breastfeeding parent does do all the nighttime care, but it doesn’t have to follow that this parent also never ever gets a break.

Protected rest

KC Davis writes that rest time in which you are responsible for a child or multiple children is not genuine rest. You could be lying on the couch reading a novel, but if you are on call, you’re not really resting.

This includes overnight. If you are on call for feeding or otherwise nurturing the baby overnight, your rest is not as high quality even if you sleep.

Protected rest is time in which a parent is not responsible for their child/ren. They don’t even have to be sleeping. Protected rest might look like lying down in a darkened room, maybe listening to music. Or doing a meditation (proponents of Yoga Nidra claim that a session of Yoga Nidra meditation is equivalent to hours of deep sleep).

Rest doesn’t have to happen at any particular time. When postpartum doula Anna Cusack had one low-sleep needs baby and night-time sleep was patchy at best, she and her husband had an arrangement wherein she would retreat into her bedroom when he got home from work and stay there until it was time for the dinner/bed/bath routine.

Maybe you never considered taking a 5pm nap but there are no rules here. It is just what works for your family.

Too many default parents and mothers go days, weeks or even years without ever having protected rest time, and the results for health and wellbeing are disastrous.

Reducing demands

Amanda Diekman, a parent support content creator who came up with the term “low demand parenting”, explained on a podcast episode that in our culture (she is from the US but this is relevant in mainstream Australian culture also) we add demands to our lives but we don’t tend to reduce them. Having a child (and having subsequent children) is one of the biggest demands we can add to our lives, but we often feel pressure to keep up the rest of our lives as if nothing has changed.

Whether we are working or on parental leave and whatever our financial situation, there is always room for reducing demands.

Some demands include:

• Housekeeping
• Get out and about
• Socialising

Reducing these demands could look like:

• Housekeeping: Letting go of standards/asking for help from someone in your life/hiring help
• Getting out and about: Only go where you want to go rather than trying to live up to some external standard of what postpartum success looks like
• Socialising: Limiting social interactions rather than packing out your calendar and ending up exhausted.

When we reduce our demands, that creates more capacity to rest, even if we can’t sleep, and even if we don’t have access to protected rest.

Seeking external support
The expectation that just two people should provide for all of the care needs and all of the financial needs of a family of one child or more is completely unreasonable, and even more so in a cost of living crisis. It is not fair for all of the sleep deprivation to fall on one parent, but the other parent can’t fill the gap either, even though we work to reduce sleep inequity out of love and respect and fairness.

This is where community comes in. Who in your life can step in to reduce the burden?

Some ways people outside the nuclear family can help:

• Taking care of the child/ren so the parent can have a nap or protected rest
• Help with housework so the parent can rest during nap times rather than feeling the need to fend off the chaos

Reflection questions

For journalling and/or discussion with a friend/partner:

1. To what extent do you prioritise rest and sleep across the space of the day?
2. Apart from your child/ren’s night-nurture needs, what barriers do you experience to rest and/or sleep?
3. Is there a regular time each day or week you could schedule protected rest?

I hope this article has been helpful for you. If you want to talk over your specific sleep circumstances, you are welcome to come to my free drop-in service, every Thursday 10am-11am during school term at Yarraville Library in the backyard.

If you would like to connect with like-minded parents, bemoan your sleep deprivation and collaborate on solutions, learn more about my six-session weekly Queer Parents’ Circle course on my services page.

Note:

This article draws from a lot of knowledge I gained during the Sleep module of Newborn Mothers Professional Training with educator Katie Cortés (the first link is an affiliate link; the second is not).

Also, for more support on sleep, you might like to check out the Beyond Sleep Training Podcast for stories on how families have managed sleep and rest needs.

[1]: This blog post presumes a household situation in which there are two parents and at least one child. Of course, single parent households exist (if this is you, the section on seeking external support will be particularly pertinent) and households with more than two adults also exist.

[2]: For information on sleep needs for other age ranges up to age 18, check out this page on the Raising Children Network.

[3]: Default parent is a term for the parent who is assumed to be on duty to look after the child/ren.