How Much Sleep Do New Moms (And Dads) Really Get?

If there’s one topic that is endlessly debated among new parents, it’s sleep – or lack thereof.

Daydreaming about a nap, nodding off in public, looking forward to bedtime before lunch. The early days, weeks and months are lost in a hazy, exhausting fog, an endless cycle of feeding, changing, winding and soothing. And somewhere in the middle of all this is a tiny demanding creature who just won’t go to sleep.

Every other month a new study comes out that states the various amounts of sleep new parents are supposedly getting. Do you ever read them and think ‘five hours’ – I wish?’

Well, a survey from Owlet Baby Care has found that almost half of parents with babies who are six months and younger get just one to three hours of uninterrupted sleep a night.

That sounds about right.

Only five percent of new parents are getting eight hours a night, according to the 2016 study.

Sleep deprivation can have a host of negative effects, both short and long-term. The impact on a day-to-day basis is impaired cognitive function which can lead to accidents, forgetfulness, clumsiness; none of them ideal when you’re caring for a small child.

To outsiders or not yet parents, who hear about how much babies sleep it’s difficult to understand the reality of caring for a new baby.

So here’s a graph created by a new dad to illustrate his daughter’s sleeping patterns from three months old.

Reddit user jitney86 wrote that he and his wife were ‘going crazy’ trying to deal with the sleep deprivation and the graph was a scientific way to help them make sense of it all.

Months 3 to 17 of my baby’s sleep and breastfeeding schedule [OC] (data collected manually and visualized in Excel) from dataisbeautiful