babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
Photo source: Chance Agrella
A lot of things change when you have kids. It’s the best experience and the hardest job in the world, and I feel very fortunate to be riding this crazy train with my three precious howler monkeys. But you may find (as I did) that your lifestyle becomes less about style and more about just plain life.
Example: You haven’t slept more than three hours in a row in two years? That’s life. You can’t wear your Prada heels because your feet grew during pregnancy. That’s life. You’ve got the sweetest, fattest, snuggliest toddler in the history of ever? That’s life, too.
Here are some very silly ways life is different — before and after kids.
Do men and women deal with sleep deprivation differently?
A small but provocative new study, presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies today, tells us that when women don’t sleep well, it trickles over into the marriage and causes tension between spouses. When men don’t sleep, the relationship carries on as normal.
The researchers tracked couples for 10 days, recording their sleep at night using an “actigraph” to measure how long it took the participants to fall asleep, how long they slept in total during the night, and how often they woke up.
During the day, the couples were asked how often they had both positive and negative interactions with each other.
The results suggested sleepy wives as the culprit for marital strife: Continue reading »
How mom and dad can get more sleep
If you follow my writing, you know that I’m mildly obsessed with the subject of sleep. Baby and kid sleep, sleep biology, dreams — these topics are endlessly fascinating to me. But I’m also a parent, and I know that in practical terms, sleep is tricky and unpredictable.
As I wrote recently, sleep deprivation has real costs to parents. Even when we think we’re awake (albeit drowsy) we may not be functioning with a whole brain. And the worst part is that as parents, we think sleep deprivation is just a way of life .
It’s not true — we need sleep (maybe even more so, since our kids require so much energy). So here is an expanded break list of tips for sleep deprived parents. Make a few of these tweaks in your house for better nighttime rest: Continue reading »
What happens in the sleepy parent's brain?
When you’re drowsy, you may feel like your brain isn’t firing on all cylinders (it takes you longer to do work, you forget details, you aren’t as enthusiastic about playing tea party).
But you’re still awake, right?
Findings this week in the journal Nature tell us that may not actually be the case. When we’re sleep deprived, it may actually be possible for parts of the brain to take a nap while our eyes are wide open and we (and the rest of the family) think we’re fully conscious.
A little unsettling, since scientists say it’s in random order that brain cells could fall asleep at the wheel while we’re going about our day. Here’s what might be happening in your mind after a sleepless night: Continue reading »
So this five-year-old drinks an entire can of Coke and…
That’s not the set up for a joke, or a scary campfire story. It’s an all-too-common reality. The journal Pediatrics is publishing a study showing that most kids drink caffeine. Even very young kids. They drink a lot of it, too. Five- to seven-year-olds drink about the equivalent of a full can of cola each day. Older kids drink about three times that amount.
They don’t escape caffeine’s side effects, either. Their sleep is impacted, with kids being shorted on sleep because they’re too wired to fall asleep early enough.
Most of the caffeine comes to the kids through soft drinks, which are also loaded with sugar and empty calories. They’re a bad deal all around.
Baby sleep: nature or nurture more important?
Today, in a study published online in the journal Pediatrics, researchers asked the question of whether sleeping patterns are related more to genes or the environment. In other words, are some babies and little kids just inherently programed to wake up more during the night and sleep a shorter time overall, or do parenting style, schedule, and all the other aspects of our daily life patterns make more of a difference?
The researchers studied 314 pairs of 18-month-old twins and looked at co-sleeping, total sleep duration, and night wakings to see how nature and nurture played in to each. Here’s what they found: Continue reading »
If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
OK, now that you’ve indulged your dreams of flying, turning invisible or having your own personal Tardis, check out this seemingly magic power: short sleep.
Short sleep is the ability to genuinely thrive on 4-6 hours a night of sleep. Short sleepers don’t just get by on less than seven hours a night like every parent I know; they genuinely don’t need any more sleep.
It’s a real-life superpower that one to three percent of the population is blessed with, giving them an extra couple of hours every day to do what they want with. Short sleepers go to bed after midnight and wake up with the early birds, fresh as daisies and ready to start the day all over again.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
9