Feeling well-rested and like you have slept enough these past few days, mama?
Yeah. Me neither.
I mean; for starters, I never get to bed on time, because pretty much the only me-time I get these days is the tiny little window between my children going to bed and me going to bed myself, which is, I think, the case for so many of us.
And then it’s the case of the kids somehow always ending up in my bed every night, which, much as I adore the snuggles, isn’t always the best solution for quality sleep. At this stage, I have gotten pretty good at sleeping in a tangle of their arms and legs, but it still doesn’t exactly yield the perfect eight hours.
Becoming a mother is a shock to the system, and the thing that knock most of us for six is probably the sleep deprivation. Which, let’s be fair, does get easier as the children grow out of the baby- and toddler years, but that still, somehow, lingers too.
However, here is a little nugget of information that might interest you: According to a recent study by AmeriSleep, the more kids a woman has, the more shut-eye she gets.
Yes, really. And look, we know it sounds biizarre AF; but that’s what the experts found, so who are we to argue.
Researchers looked at data collected by the American Time Use Survey, to see if they could gain a deeper insight into the sleeping habits of mums and dads in America. Surprisingly, it was discovered that on average parents were getting a solid eight or nine hours a day. Dads reportedly fair better with one child, gaining 8.8 hours of sleep a night. When the family grows by another one or two, this goes own to 8.6 hours. Dads with four or five kids get 8.4 hours. Mums, on the other hand, get their best sleep after they’ve had four or five kids for an average of 8.9 hours.
So, how does this work, we hear you thinking? How are mums that have five lots of lunches to make and ten pairs of tiny shoes to find able to get more sleep than mums who only have one child to care for? Well, it’s not as cut and dry as it seems, as the study doesn’t just take into consideration the average amount of sleep per night, but per day.
As in; sleep-related activities such as napping or dozing off during the bedtime hour also had an impact, and according to the study authors, mums of four or five children reported more of these activities, probably due to sheer and utter exhaustion.
Sounds more plausible now? We think so too.
