As every parent of a newborn knows, sleep is a foreign country, a place that they happily visited a long time ago but fear they may now never experience again. The constant disruption to sleep patterns posed by a screaming baby can play havoc with relationships, waistlines and sanity, but it’s also having a deleterious effect on the nation’s finances. Until now.
In the first study of its kind, Joan Costa-i-Font and Sarah Flèche, of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Political Science, have found that baby-induced fatigue is significantly undermining economic performance. Their work is to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in April.
They reached their conclusion after examining the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children dataset, which follows a sample of 14,000 British families from a child’s birth to the age of 25. The data contains precise information on the child’s quality of sleep, including whether they wake up at night and how often.
A one-hour increase in the amount of sleep a baby has increases the time a mother sleeps by 12 minutes. Every time a baby wakes up, a mother loses 30 minutes of sleep.
These results were then correlated against the parents’ employment experiences. Costa-i-Font and Flèche say: “The effects of parental sleep on economic performance are substantial.”
A one-hour increase in the amount of sleep a mother has improves their employment prospects by 4%. It also, they say, correlates to a 7% increase in the number of hours they work and an impressive 11% rise in household income. There is also a 1% increase in job satisfaction.
The effect of disruptive children on paternal sleep was found to be only half of that on maternal sleep.
Last week’s Great British Bedtime report by the Sleep Council found that a quarter of people are now using alcohol as a “sleep remedy”, compared to just 16% in 2013.
