Why Modern Parents More Sleep Deprived Than Our Ancestors
Ancient parents probably didn’t feel as tired as modern parents do, even though the amount of sleep wasn’t that different. Studies on hunter-gatherer communities today show that adults sleep around 6–8 hours a night and say they feel great about their sleep — unlike modern parents, who often say they feel terrible despite sleeping similar amounts. A big reason is how they slept: mothers in nearly every ancient-style society slept next to their babies and breastfed through the night, so they never fully woke up during night feeds and felt more rested the next morning. The hormone released during breastfeeding also naturally made mothers sleepier. On top of that, ancient parents had no alarm to set, no job to show up to, and didn’t track every feed on their phone — all things that now trick our brains into waking up fully in the middle of the night.
The other huge difference was that ancient parents didn’t raise kids alone. In foraging communities, grandparents, older siblings, and other people in the group all helped look after babies, with some infants spending more than half their time with someone other than their mother. Kids were also born about four years apart, so parents weren’t dealing with multiple tiny children at the same time. Today, most parents do it all — raise kids, work full-time, and handle most of the household — often without much outside help. Experts say it’s not that modern parents sleep too little; it’s that everything around them makes an already hard job feel so much harder.