A Healthy Child Needs a Healthy Brain, A Healthy Brain Needs Healthy Sleep

Sleep Advice For Mothers

A 2022 paper by Professor Liat Tikotzky illustrate how important mother’s sleep is for her relationship to her baby. The mother’s sleep was objectively recorded for seven nights at 4 and 8 months of age. Each evening, mothers rated the level of agreement with the following statements regarding their feelings toward their infant:

1. Today, I had patience to care for my baby.
2. Today, I had a desire to be with my baby.
3. Today, I felt anger toward my baby.

“When a mother had lower objective sleep quality on a given night, she reported lower levels of patience for her infant and more anger on the following day. Improving maternal sleep quality might be an important target for future interventions which help mothers to feel more positively toward their infants.”

Another 2022 study: “Factors associated with maternal overall quality of life six months postpartum” from Norway included almost 90,000 mothers and children.

The mother’s ‘overall quality of life’ was measured by her agreement or disagreement with five questions:

1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
3. I am satisfied with my life.
4. So far, I have gotten the important things I want in life.
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

When the child was 6 months of age, they studied:

• selected symptoms of the mother (joy/anger and depression)
• socio-demographic variables of the mother
• mother’s feelings related to childbirth or health perception of the birth
• mother’s parental relationship satisfaction (Blog Post 116)
• infant’s sleep duration

They asked how these items were related to the mother’s ‘overall quality of life’.

Mothers’ overall quality of life was associated with joy of motherhood, relationship satisfaction, and especially, long infant sleep duration.

Their conclusion: “Health professionals and clinicians should focus on infant’s sleep but also on supporting joy of motherhood and strengthening relationships of the new parents when they develop health interventions or provide counseling to new mothers and families.”

· Blog Post 111 confirms that an indirect intervention to improve maternal sleep quality is moving the infant’s bedtime earlier:

1. Infant’s night sleep duration increased.
2. Infant’s night awakenings decreased.
3. Maternal sleep quality improved,
4. Maternal postnatal depression decreased

Better sleep in older children (2-13 years) improves mother’s mental health.