My sleep pattern changed when I had a kid and remained that way. I always needed 7 hours of sleep to feel good and productive, but after the baby, I've found myself being equally productive with 5-5.5hrs of sleep.
You aren't sleeping less because you need less. You have lost the ability to stay asleep for a healthy amount of time.
It took a lot of effort to reset my body to obtain a more healthy amount of sleep. I think I went about a month with 1-3 hours per night. The initial cause was "sleep regression in twins", but that was only for 2 weeks. The next 2 weeks was how long it took me to get my body to sleep more than a couple hours per night.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...
It’s mostly a fairly simple scheduling problem, plus having one adult sleeping somewhere they can’t hear the baby during each “shift” (loud fans help). Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby also lets you slooowwwly stretch your response times longer, which is a nice smooth way work toward the glorious 1-feeding-per-night and finally no-night-feedings period (babies wake up and cry even when not hungry—past the earliest weeks, immediate feeding may not be necessary, and if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer)
All bets off if you have a kid who’s ill, but for most babies, it’s entirely achievable.
Wouldn't it be easier to have a soundproofed room for either the parents or the baby?
Your key assumption is "not badly space-constrained" is plausible, but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
> if you can wait a minute they may go back to sleep, because they weren’t hungry, they’d just woken up and briefly freaked out—if you keep pouncing every time as soon as they make a noise, it trains them to stay awake rather than going back to sleep, and you’ll have a bad time for, potentially, much longer
Your observations would be in favor of soundproofing where delaying intervention would be a feature, not a bug.
> but no time/scheduling constraints for adults seems unlikely.
For parents with 9-5 sorts of jobs, it works fine. You don’t even need “sleep-per-parent x2” amounts of contiguous time available, because there’ll be a gap of usually a hour or three between the last time the kid wakes up for first-parent and the first time they wake up for second-parent, and it’s not like you can’t get any sleep while “on duty”. We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent in the very worst weeks for each kid, and more than that for total sleep, with a sleep window (for us, the parents) of about 10 hours. Not sure what you mean. Yeah inconsistent shift work or something could mess it up, but that messes up everything.
I'm basically non functional at less than 7h of uninterrupted sleep per night.
> We were managing 6ish uninterrupted hours per parent
It may not be enough
> What’s with the soundproofing thing?
Soundproof the room where either the parents or the baby are would be more reliable to control the noise level by preventing it from reaching out instead of adding more.
It could also be converted later into a music room
What we did was just one of us would sleep in another room with the monitor, and the other in our normal bedroom. Fan and door closed was all the soundproofing we needed in the normal bedroom. But that’s why having little space might make it a lot tougher—ours relied on having three rooms, two of which with sleeping-places for adults.
And Ok we probably weren’t averaging 7 hours uninterrupted until about 6-8 weeks, but total sleep was consistently over 7, and uninterrupted of 6ish is a lot better than what many parents report (the ones where both get up for every feeding… I’ll never understand those folks)
[edit] my overall point is that with just a little thought applied to the problem, and possibly some resources but likely not that much if you already live in a house instead of a small apartment, you’re not guaranteed impossibly-short sounding amounts of sleep just because you have an infant.
Oh I absolutely agree, I just wanted to understand the problem better and see if there was something I had missed!
and "Not having to jump instantly on the crying baby" made things worse
our experience was a not great to begin with, but the sleep deprivation only lasted around 6-10months per child and for the benefits it gave - I would definately do it again
to all the potential parents out there, please do your own research and try not to fall in the trap of the victorian mindset - which on the whole (massively over simplifying it) seems to suggest actions to make your life easier at the expense of the baby.
[edit] and actually the whole rest of this holds without capping it with that action, it just means you’ll need to keep up the shift thing for 6-12 months instead of 3, and—from what I’ve seen—deal with a couple nights a week of your kid waking up in the middle of the night the whole rest of their early childhood. The shift-sleeping strategy has no bearing on that, but does get you a couple REM cycles a night, even in the worst of it.
(But yes, worth it).