The expectant father: sleep edition
Sleeping baby, Photo by Dakota Corbin on Unsplash
In this episode of the Papa est Fatigué podcast, Dave and Jim give the expectant father some insight into sleep and the realities of bringing home a newborn. They’ll discuss their experiences with their first-borns and give soon to be dads some tips and tricks for surviving.
During this episode we discuss:
The findings from a study on how much sleep parents lose with newborns
Our experience with sleep and sleep deprivation with our first borns
How things changed with our second children
How our children’s sleep behaviors have changed as they’ve gotten older
Resources mentioned in the podcast:
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Transcript:
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Dave: On today's podcast, Jim and I will be discussing a study we came across that details how long parents lose sleep after having a child. Spoiler alert, it's brutal.
Hi, everyone, this is Dave from the Papa est Fatigué podcast. The podcast for dads by dads. Jim and I saw an article the other week entitled How Long do Parents Lose Sleep After Having a Kid? You should probably sit down. Now, let me tell you the data is ugly. Today we're going to be discussing how long it took for us to get a good night's sleep once we became parents. Before we get started, here's a little bit about us. I'm a father of two. I have a seven-year-old daughter and a four-year-old boy.
Jim: I'm Jim. I've got two daughters, one seven and one four.
Dave: This study is from the aptly named journal Sleep and it was conducted in Germany over the course of eight years, and here are the key findings.
The peak of sleep deprivation occurred within the first three months after a new baby's birth.
Sleep quality and quantity did not return to pre-baby levels until six years after birth.
Moms reported losing more sleep than dads, especially during the first few months. Women reported losing an hour of sleep per night during the first three months after child birth, and then 40 minutes on average for the first year.
Men reported losing on average 13 minutes of sleep by that same three month mark.
Interestingly, parental age, household income, and dual versus single parenting were unrelated, or only very weakly related to improved sleep.
Breastfeeding slightly increased the negative effects of child birth on sleep satisfaction and duration among moms.
There's a ton of stuff to unpack there, and we thought we would talk a little bit about our experiences. Jim, if you could just kick us off here and tell us a little bit about how things worked with your first born.
Jim: The title of this podcast and the merch that we have came from my experience. I was really not prepared for the level of sleep deprivation and how sensitive I was to the lack of sleep. They say there's 13 minutes of sleep at night that we miss, but what's important to understand is that that sleep is cumulative. Sleep deprivation is cumulative. It's a little discouraging to me. My youngest at five, let's say another year or two, and add that to my first born. I'm looking at 10 or 11 years of sleep deprivation. Obviously, you adapt and get used to it, but I'm tired.
Also, the idea that parental age doesn't come into effect, I don't believe it. I'm sure that younger dads can handle it better than I can. I mentioned it before. I thought that there were days where I thought I was really going to hurt myself, that I was just sleep walking through the day. I was going to walk in front of the bus or something like that. Looking back on it, it started really early. My seven-year-old was born a little bit early, and so we spent some extra time in the hospital.
My wife needed some medicine. The seven-year-old at the time needed some extra attention, and so we were being interrupted every two or three hours. The nurse would come in and give medicine, or we'd have to eat, or we'd have to feed the seven-year-old, and it was so disruptive over two days that I felt like I was losing my mind. It was rough and so after three days, I felt like we had to get out of there. Once we got home, it didn't really improve all that much, and I think that we had the same sort of disruption.
Mostly, what made it so hard is that we were dealing with colic, and I didn't know what colic was. Now I know it's this little baby acid reflux. The seven-year-old wanted to eat because the milk would wash down the throat and would make her feel better, but then her stomach would be full and so then it would come up, and then she'd have that reflux reaction. She had to sleep sitting up and we had to monitor the food pretty carefully. Either my wife or I, were going to be up all night, sitting in a lounger, holding her on our chest. For the first six months, nine months or so, it was rough. We were sleeping half nights on the chair and I just wasn't getting enough sleep.
Dave: It's interesting that your experience was so rough. I'm not saying that mine wasn't, but we had a very different time in the hospital. I think that it's a reflection of the fact that babies are all very different. I very vividly remember being in the hospital. We looked at each other and said, "Our daughter is so calm. She's sleeping. Sleeping like a baby. We got lucky.” I remember thinking, they always have this little edge cases where kids do great and you hear about people that have babies that sleep through, and we are one of the lucky ones.I remember celebrating there for a little bit.
We got home and I would say within a few hours, it just all fell apart. It was just nonstop crying and fussing, and we're like, "What happened to this kid that we knew in the hospital?" What a mess. It was a bit of a shock. For those first three days like, "We are golden, we scored." That was pretty brutal to come to that realization. I would say that, one of the things that I was completely unprepared for was the fact that during the first, I think it's the first two weeks, you're suppose to wake that kid up and feed them every two hours because they lose birth weight, and so you're trying to get them back up to birth. I'm like, "Why did nobody tell me this until we were on our way out the hospital?"
You sit there thinking like, "This kid has been up all day crying. Now they're asleep. I have to wake them up in two hours? This is not cool at all." How we handled that during the night time is, I wanted to be as much of an active participant as I could and take as much of the pressure off my wife. While the decision was made to breastfeed, my role in it was to say, "Look, I will be the one to set the alarm every two hours. I will wake up, wake her up also, check the diaper, change if needed, and then hand her off to my wife to breastfeed." I think that at least that way we shared the pain a little bit, and so I felt like that was my nod to say, "We're in this together."
The other thing was, I was always concerned about, I don't want to say necessarily edge cases, but things like SIDS where you have this sudden dramatic thing that happens that you still don't understand why it happens. I did so much reading up on SIDS and it clearly got to me subconsciously. I remember every time she would cough, or maybe she'd wing an arm out and hit the crib, I was up like a lightning bolt. I'm like, "She's dying." It was really that much ingrained in me that SIDS was kind of a big thing.
I remember many, many times waking up in front of the crib without having any idea of how I got there. It's just like, "Okay, what happened? I guess she coughed, and I woke up, and here I am." So you go back to sleep. Especially the first few months where you're, "Are they crying because they're cold? They're sleepy, they're hungry." You don't know what's going on. There's so much happening that you're stressed out and then the kid's crying.
Those first few months especially as you're just learning to be a parent are especially brutal. There's no way I lost 13 minutes of sleep every night, especially in those first few weeks. There's no way.
In looking back at that experience, what kinds of tips or tricks did you come up with to help you navigate those first few weeks or few months?
Jim: When she got a little bit older, the first born, we did breastfeeding as well and we had this-- This is a good tip. We had a nice little sidecar that we strapped to the bed. The baby would sleep on the bed, my wife would sleep next to her. Then every two hours or when she cried, my wife would just roll over and pull her into bed, and then they would just lay down. I had the same feeling. When my first born got to a year old, I realized that I thought everything I did was going to kill her. Strawberries, honey, I'm like, "Who knew about that stuff?"
I also had that SIDS concern, so I would never really sleep restfully. Especially when my wife was in the bed with the newborn. I'd be awake and make sure she wasn't rolling over her. I never really slept restfully. One of the things that helped is alternating. I know a lot of parents that did every other one. I do one, you the next one. That seems fair. We divided the night up 50/50, which helped because then at least we could get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, and that was really helpful.
Naps, of course. I think we'll talk about naps in another time. I spoke with some parents that had a night nanny, and I think this was after we had our second kid. That just blew me away that that was even a possibility. I don't know if it was an option for us, but the possibility of having somebody take care of your kid while you had a goodnight sleep was amazing. If that's something that's available to you, I'd strongly recommend it.
Dave: It's funny you talk about the side by side sleeping. I always worried that our daughter was going to get smothered by the boob and die. What a way to go. Smothered by the boob and die, suffocated. Yes, those things are a little bit overblown. Obviously, you have to worry. I think that's an interesting point that you bring up that, even when you are sleeping, you're not ever fully comfortable when you have so much worry like that. Where I'm like, "Okay, she's in the bed. I need to make sure that when everybody's asleep to just keep tabs on stuff." You never have any real restful sleep I think at the beginning.
In terms of things that we did, yes, I agree. We shared the pain certainly. I talked about the wake up and change. Also at the beginning, my wife was having some problems with breastfeeding. That's pretty common. We tried all sorts of stuff. We saw the lactation consultant, I think, seven or eight times in the first couple of weeks. There were all sorts of new things to try. A lot of them were bottle feeding because they're like, "Look, we just need to get something into your child." During that period where there was a decent amount of bottle feeding, we split things up. Again, that was important also to sleep when they're sleeping. As you mentioned that, the kid is going to run your life. Just accept it and try and sneak in those naps when you can, if that's possible.
I would say the other thing is, again, as we talk about sleep deprivation and the stress that comes, especially if you have in-laws or just anything that adds to the change in your normal routine, just be patient. Everyone is on edge. Everyone's either stressed out or sleep-deprived. If you need a break, take that break. If it's going to the gym or going for a walk or whatever, doing yoga, whatever it is. Find something that can just take you away from it for just that little bit. There are a few times where I'm like, "I got to get out of here. There's too much going on."
I would just go for a quick drive, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever, just to have that moment of calm, to just reset, was at least for me, really, really important. I would argue that actually I probably should have done a little bit more. It wasn't like I did it that often, it was maybe like once every two to three weeks, but I probably actually needed a little bit more than that. Those, I think, are important to have.
The other thing that is interesting is, once you have that firstborn and you've gone through that process and you fully understand what it means to be a parent. The second one is always very, very different. You're focusing less on what's happening now. You understand that if they're crying or if they hit the side of their crib or cough, it's not the end of the world, it's not SIDS, so there's a little bit of difference there. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with your second born and how that changed between the two?
Jim: When we got close to the due date for the second, my wife and I were both very aware that we were having some PTSD. We realized this event was coming and we were going to go through this again and we were kind of anxious. We wanted the due day, but we really didn't because we knew what was coming and we got really lucky. The second was, she'd feed go right back to sleep, sleep for four hours at a stretch in some cases. In a strange way, she just had a more independent personality and I think that's true. She still does.
We had thought that if the experiences had been reversed and that we had the easy kid first and then the difficult one second, we just would have been at our wit's end. I don't think that we would have known how to handle it, so having it in that order was important. They say the second one is easier. Certainly, it was in my experience. As I've said before, what people forget to tell you is that you already have a kid. Yes, the second one is easier, but it's the second one. You've got a toddler who still needs attention and still needs some night attention as well and then you're taking care of the second one, which is easier as a kid but just overall it's more to juggle.
Dave: We had a very similar experience where our second one was pretty chill. I think the challenge a lot of times for the second one, because you know what you're doing this time around, the new thing is how do you manage the two kids? In some instances, your oldest one is old enough to understand in broad strokes what it means that there's going to be a second child. In some instances, they're too young to even understand and all of a sudden there's this new thing in their life.
I remember for us, a lot of what I did leading up was figuring out how to handle the older one, who this is all very new to her. They talk sometimes about the older one regresses because they see all this attention is being lavished on the newborn. It's important to me to come up with a plan of action for that first little bit of time. We had talked to some friends who said, what they'd seen a lot is people bringing presents that would be, it's basically the present from the newborn to the older child.
Jim: Yes, we did that.
Dave: We did that. I remember with our second-born, our oldest was at my parent's place for the two to three days that you're in the hospital. I remember when our oldest came in, she was very tentative. I think part of it is being in a hospital, but then also like, "Okay, I know that there's this new thing here that is somehow part of my family, but I'm not really sure how this is all going to play out." I don't want to say that the present broke the ice, but I think at least there was something to be like, "Hey, welcome to you too." That's one thing we did.
The other thing was that I had planned to take her out to dinner across the street, there's a bunch of restaurants across the hospital. I'm like, "Okay. When she comes in- I think they came in a little bit before dinner time- we'll spend some time with the baby and then I'll take her out to dinner." My parents and I and our daughter, we went across the street and I'm like, "We'll eat here." She was adamant. She was like, "No. Let's go back to the hospital. I want to see what this deal is all about." That was a good sign.
Then that first weekend, I had planned for us to go on an outing. We went to Pier 39 and we were just in one of those stores and we're going to buy a key chain to commemorate this. I'm like, "All right, you can go pick a key chain out." She picked the key chain out and then she pulls another one off and she says, "This one is for my brother."
Jim: That's sweet.
Dave: Okay. This feels like we're going to have hopefully a good relationship between the two kids. I don't control that. That's who she is. There's nothing I did to help foster that in her, but that was helpful. I think that is also somewhat helped the whole transition with the second one also in terms of the feeding and the sleep schedule and her understanding that this other thing needed some attention. That was helpful. In terms of the actual day to day and managing things, I will say that because I understood that a cough wasn't the end of the world, I did honestly, unfortunately, sleep through probably more of the nursings than I should have in all fairness to my wife, so it is very different.
Flash forward, whatever, seven years later, two years later, what is your nighttime routine like now? From the survey it's six years before you get back to having a normal pre-baby schedule. Your oldest is seven. My oldest is seven and the youngest ones are five and four. Talk a little bit about, do you see the light at the end of the tunnel? What are the new challenges that we have with sleep routines now that they're a little bit older?
Jim: I've just surrendered to it. [laughter] Just trying to do what I can. Before we move on, I want to make a comment. This means probably a whole other conversation. You've reminded me, probably the most emotional moment I had as a parent was bringing the older one in to meet the younger one. It was terribly complex.
You reminded me of it. It is something that was very profound. For me, it was an experience of, we were ending a chapter. It was no longer just the two of us and my first daughter. It was now something else. We were starting a new chapter, but that ending really hit me. Then seeing my older coming to the hospital room and just have this, as you said, she didn't really know what was going on, but she came in with this little kid bravery of just, "Let's go in and see what this is like." It was very moving to me. In any event, I guess that's probably another conversation.
When I say I surrendered to it, I usually handle bedtime with the girls and we get into bed. I try to do about 7:00 or 7:30. I once joked to a friend of mine, early on, I started putting them to bed at ten o'clock in the morning. It was get the snack. Get the right schedule. Get the nap at the right schedule. Make sure they don't nap too long and set up that whole day so that when we got to bedtime, it was going to work.
Anyway, about 7:30, we start calming down. I dim the lights in the house. We have some quiet time. I give them a little snack so they don't wake up hungry in the middle of the night. Then we'll all get in the big bed as we call it. I will read stories or I'll tell stories to both of them and they'll fall asleep. One in each shoulder, one in each arm, and it's one of the most precious memories and continues to be one of the precious memories I have as a father. Then I'll fall asleep too.
I got these two little warms, snugly, snoring things on either side of me and I'm out. Then I'll probably wake up about 12:30 or one o'clock in the morning, or when my wife comes to bed, she'll carry them to their beds, or when I wake up, I'll carry them to their beds. It seems to work. It's kind of high maintenance.
My brother and his wife did some really aggressive sleep training with their kid and it was heartbreaking to hear. We went on vacations where we'd be staying over at their house and they would let him cry it out. We heard the crying out method was you let them cry for a little bit and then you go in and comfort them and then you put them back down to bed. They just let him cry for sometimes an hour. It was heartbreaking to hear, but he reaped all the benefits of that and his kid doesn't remember any of that. I don't think it caused any lasting trauma in anyway and they went to bed very easily. In their house, eight o'clock, kid's gone to bed, read a story, lights out and that's it. Our experience and our routine is much more high maintenance but like I say, they're not going to fall asleep in the bed with me forever. I enjoy what we have.
Dave: We were similar in that sense. Over here I'm responsible for nighttime routine, similar to you. My wife, it’s not atypical for here to work past midnight, seven days a week so a lot of times, the nighttime routine falls to me. Kids in bed by 7:45 usually and then you get about a half-hour of stories. 8:15 lights out. I read in their room. For us, weekends are better than weekdays because our four-year-old still is at a school that they allow them to nap, which is brutal for me at night. On a weekday, our oldest usually, 8:15 lights out, she's asleep maybe in half an hour. On a bad day, our youngest can go until about 10:00 or 10:30 before he's asleep.
He's just hanging out in the room for two hours. Usually, he's in the bed for those two hours but that is problematic for me. Weekends are much better because he doesn't have the nap and usually everyone's asleep by 9:00, 9:30 at the latest. We were a little bit slower on sleep training as well. We did go back and forth on the whole cry it out thing. I think that's one of those things you either do or you don't do. There's no half-assing that. Right? I think we were on opposite ends where I wanted to get those kids sleep-trained a little bit earlier and my wife was a little bit more hesitant to that. I think part of that was similar to you. She enjoyed going to sleep with the kids.
Rightfully, the thing is, it's a moment in time. You're not going to have a 13-year-old kid sleeping with you, nor should you. This is that age where they're happy to do that and so there's some level of "It's never coming back again." We were sleeping with the kids off and on till five or six. My wife, much more so than I. Then I would say maybe in the last, I don't know, feels like six months to a year but I don't know. With all this coronavirus, who knows when it actually started. [laughs] We started to transition a little bit away from that.
When we decided that we're going to sleep train them a little bit, it was like, "Okay. We're going to go from sitting right there next to them while they go to sleep to maybe a foot away, and then moving two feet away, and now we're in the middle of the room." Eventually, you work your way into the hallway. You're just in a little chair, doing work while the kids are starting to go to sleep. In between then we've had a little bit of a bout with something that appeared to be night terrors with our oldest one, where she would just wake up screaming and you don't know why and when you asked her, she's unresponsive. It was concerning and scary at the beginning.
Then you get into the habit of, okay, it happens here and then. In the morning she has no recollection of what happened so it didn't seem like it affected her. Today, the seven-year-old is pretty cool, she can sleep on her own. We can turn off the lights and she's good to go. The kids share a room so I think maybe that's helpful. Not only do they share a room but while they have bunk beds, they sleep together. They choose to sleep together so that's probably a little bit calming for her. The four-year-old, he's not ready yet. I'll flip out the lights and I'll go back in the living room working. He'll probably come out three or four times.
He will just ask me questions like, "Can you have a fire truck in outer space?" [laughter] A short discussion about that and then he'll, "Okay," and then he'll go back to sleep. The rule is when your sister's asleep, you can come and get me, and then I'll go into the room and I basically sit in the closet. I'll do some work or read a book or whatever, in the closet. He'll actually go to sleep faster that way. That's a stopgap to fully being sleep-trained and I'm okay with that because I can still get some stuff done.
Besides that trick, from my perspective, of getting a little bit further away from the kids, what kind of tricks or tips do you have as it relates to getting the girls to sleep now?
Jim: Your method is fascinating. That sort of getting to an arm's length just a foot at a time, that's really fascinating. I've been more tolerant of the seven-year-old because my feeling, and it may be the same with your kids, is that there's a lot of anxiety and stress about this time, about this last year, and I think it's just coming out sideways because kids don't have the strategies to deal with those things. We had something similar. It wasn't night terrors but nightmares. In maybe a different way, they were terrifying to watch because she was genuinely haunted of whatever it was in the nightmare that was so serious.
It was traumatic, which is why she now falls asleep with one of the parents, which is fine. We will end up having some distance and some time when she starts growing up and sleeping by herself. For the time being, that's helped with the night terrors. Once they fall asleep and once we move them to their beds, they don't wake up. They'll sleep through the rest of the night and that doesn't happen if we do it otherwise. There's always some, as your kid, coming out. They want a glass of water, they want a snack, they're too hot, they're too cold, they want to change their pajamas, and it's just never ending. The way that we're doing it now, it seems to be calm. It seems to be comforting to them and seems to get them to sleep through the night.
Dave: I guess if our experiences are in line with the study, we've got about another year or two more of sleep deprivation. At least we know what we're in for this time around.
With that said, if you're an expecting father, now you know what to expect. If your kid's under six, just keep counting down the days till you go back to sleep. If you'd like to connect with us, head over to our Facebook page at facebook.com/papaestfatigue. That's P-A-P-A E-S-T F-A-T-I-G-U-E. We'll put all the links in the show notes.
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