A new study has found that moms who get the right amount of sleep are more satisfied with life. Motherhood is full of a lot of certainties. One of those certainties is that mom is going to be tired. Unless she is one of the lucky few who have children who have always slept through the night, mom is constantly getting up with her children.
This started when their baby was born, but then their baby turned into a curious toddler who was prone to wandering the house at night. Then they turned into an older child who has nightmares, and then a tween who never wants to go to bed at all. Moms are always tired.
According to Medical Xpress, a new study has found that sufficient sleep for parents can lead to life satisfaction. This means mom may want to work on how she can get more rest at night.
This study was done by Pennsylvania State University, and it can be read in full here. This study showed that this was the same for both new and “established” parents. This means that it didn’t matter how old the children were, parents needed to get better sleep.
To complete this study, researchers looked at sleep, physical activity, mental health and life satisfactions in couples. They found that those who met the sleep guidelines had better mental health, and this led to better life satisfaction. The interesting thing was that this improvement was only seen in moms, and fathers had no changes regardless of whether they were parents or not.
Researchers stated that it is known that physical activity decreases when one becomes a parent, because there are fewer opportunities to get out and get moving, but parents are also not meeting the recommended sleeping guidelines. They stated that there needs to be some interventions in place that can help couples who have children get more sleep. This can go a long way to help preserve the mental health of parents.
One of the tips that they are suggesting for parents is to avoid eating large meals and drinking caffeine close to bedtime. This can help them get to bed on time, and fall asleep. They did find that even small improvements in sleep can have a positive impact on the mental health and wellbeing of parents, and this can only benefit their children and the whole family.
Sources: Medical Xpress, Science Direct