Who Gets the Most Sleep in Your House?

Who gets the most sleep in your house? Well, according to research published this month, in families with children it tends to be the dads who enjoy the most slumber and younger mums with children who get the least sleep. If you’re at the stage where your toddler has started allowing you the odd lie in past 6am and you’re thinking about adding to your family, you may want to brace yourself. Research conducted by Georgia Southern University found that for every new bundle of joy they add to the family, women increase their chances of suffering from bad sleep by 50 per cent. In news that’s probably less than surprising to mums out there, younger women with children reported feeling tired on average 14 days per month compared to just 11 days for those in households without children. The study didn’t pick up on sleep differences in young men though – who reported getting around the same amount of sleep and same amount of tiredness whether they had children or not. Those who conducted the study said that women might in fact need more sleep in order to feel sufficiently rested. The leader of the study, Dr Sullivan said: ‘Children in the household were associated with the frequency of feeling unrested among younger women, but not among younger men. This fits with other research that has shown that women report sleep difficulties about twice as often as men and actually need more sleep than men in order to feel rested. Does this ring true in your household? Is mum always the most tired or is dad the one who always feels in need of some extra sleep? Perhaps you work in shifts to see to settle restless little ones back in their cabin beds or take it in turns to enjoy an extra half an hour in bed when your schedules allow? Or does it sometimes feel like the cat or the dogs are the only ones who are able to get some decent shuteye? If you’d like to know how much sleep you should be getting based on when your working day gets going, this MailOnline article has a built in sleep calculator. Be warned, you may find the results a little depressing depending on how much sleep you’re currently getting!