As a father of multiple kids younger than that, I have a very different experience.
I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m slightly taken aback by this comment because this isn’t a common feature of having older children. The only parents I know having sleep deprivation problems have very young children. I have a lot of parent friends and I’ve never heard anyone claim that sleep deprivation continued until older ages, let alone that it’s common.
Same, as the father of three children, I believe a lot of it has to do with sleep pattern conditioning. You are literally training minds to sleep on a rigid schedule to keep your own sanity. That implies sticking to rigid timing as much as possible and creating the optimal environment for success. E.g., correct lighting, air movement, sound (I highly recommend “Hey Siri, play Pure Meditation playlist”) at a low volume, and if you live in an otherwise particularly hectic environment, appropriately dosed and timed melatonin supplements. You reap the rewards of your own hard training work, or suffer the consequences of the lack thereof.
Like I said, I have kids too. But enforcing boundaries and sleep schedules is lot different than claiming a decade of sleep depreciation. Kids sleep longer than we do as adults. I’m not losing sleep by getting them up in the morning unless I stay up late on my own, because we both have things to do in the morning.
The battlefield changes as kids age. It’s impossible to have any realistic discussion about sleep habits without discussing the elephant in the room. What is your device policy and how do you manage screen time, what your bedtime routine is (you better have one!) and how good you are at sticking to the timing on a daily basis.
Congrats and guard your sleep hygiene as much as possible (practically impossible advice to follow in most cases).
I went through a really rough period because of the lack of sleep. I noticed that hydration during that period was also challenging, so I wonder if this is related to the brain shrink effect.
Parents are supposed to sleep when the baby sleeps. Industrial work culture does not allow this. One of the many things leading the "Western" lifestyle to extinction.
This is funny in how cut and dry it is. My friend, do you have kids?
It's my theory that crying evolved as a trait because it forces parents to go find some place safe lest a predator finds them, thus ensuring the helpless kid can grow in safe environments.
Note that there is no mention of sleep in there. That's bonus round if you get it.
"Honey, I know we're driving back from the dr right now, but someone on the internet said that when the baby sleeps we need to sleep. Kid is asleep, better pull over on the shoulder and take a nap."
"Hey babe, I know you're hungry, but you can't eat right now, the baby is sleeping."
"Honey, I understand that billy has practice right now, but we can't take him, THE BABY IS ASLEEP."
These brain chemical rewards apparently do not work on me, my (still young) kids provide no such rejuvenation. Luckily I'm a deep sleeper so I have no sleep deprivation problems.
They should be sleep deprived the same way for it to be a real control group, at least in the context of "becoming a father". Otherwise it's just "being sleep deprived for 6-12 months has X effect", which is much less informative. We already know being sleep deprived for long stretches is really bad.
I'd need to read the actual paper, but isn't poor sleep also correlated with "shrinkage" in the brain? And when you have a baby, sleep is one of those things that you don't typically get enough, or high enough quality, of.
My second born didn't sleep through for over 6 years, from the run of mill crying as a baby to horrendous night terrors multiple times a night, every night. I've never felt right since and always joked that if I had my brain scanned they would see damage.
Father of a ten year old here; I definitely still daydream, and I think I did for most of the time I've been a father - but it's genuinely difficult to remember that sort of thing.
I wonder if it's some sort of adaptive mechanism, to prevent new sleep-deprived parents from completely losing the plot. Less daydreaming might mean more paying attention to this screaming thing that just fell out of you, and to every predator it's probably attracting from miles around.
I mostly stopped daydreaming at some point in my 20s too, after a fairly intense daydreaming life until then. Oh, and no kids yet :) so it could just be "life"
I wonder what people mean when they talk about daydreaming? I think perhaps it's an experience I don't have, or perhaps constantly have? I have pretty strong and untreated inattentive type ADHD so maybe my whole life is a daydream.
When you say you don't daydream, you mean you don't think about non task related things? How do you experience daydreams? Is it a nonvoluntary thing or is it more like actually going to sleep - deliberately entering a contemplative state where your mind wanders?
The title of the article is more on the sensationalist side unfortunately, the actual paper gives a different view [1].
There are two parts worth quoting:
> Although cortical reductions sometimes reflect a process of neurodegeneration, they can also be a sign of refinement and specialization of neural circuits. Adolescence, for instance, is a life period characterized by the continued elimination of redundant synapses (i.e. synaptic pruning) which parallels cognitive and emotional development (Selemon 2013). In the context of the transition to parent-hood, several examples across human and non-human mammals show functional improvements after reductions in brain markers (Pawluski et al. 2022).
And:
> Although we found converging evidence of cortical reductions
across the two samples, a number of divergent findings also emerged. First, when disentangling the cortical volume reduction, Californian fathers displayed significant reductions in area and Spanish fathers in thickness. Changes in the area may reflect changes in the number of cells located between radial columns of the brain, while changes in thickness may reflect changes in the number of cells within ontogenic columns (Petanjek et al. 2011). Secondly, the volume of the dorsal attentional network, which supports goal-directed attention, was significantly reduced in Spanish fathers, while it did not show significant changes in Californian fathers. Combined with the default mode network,
this network may control sustained attention (Spreng et al. 2010, 2013), a behavior that is often required during childrearing. It is possible that these inconsistent results at the statistical level
may be due to the different scan timing windows or to cultural or behavioral differences. For example, due to more generous paternity leave policies in Spain
As someone who cares about such a thing and had no awareness of that, I would tend to disagree. Nytimes gets posted enough that I have encountered the pay wall, but the economist, I’d have had to guess. I also tried to look at the article and didn’t see the year when trying to open the truncated article, and do like to know that I have started reading something old. I just don’t really agree with your comment at all from almost any angle, but I don’t think either one of us has numbers to back up anything
I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m slightly taken aback by this comment because this isn’t a common feature of having older children. The only parents I know having sleep deprivation problems have very young children. I have a lot of parent friends and I’ve never heard anyone claim that sleep deprivation continued until older ages, let alone that it’s common.
I went through a really rough period because of the lack of sleep. I noticed that hydration during that period was also challenging, so I wonder if this is related to the brain shrink effect.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323595
It's my theory that crying evolved as a trait because it forces parents to go find some place safe lest a predator finds them, thus ensuring the helpless kid can grow in safe environments.
Note that there is no mention of sleep in there. That's bonus round if you get it.
"Hey babe, I know you're hungry, but you can't eat right now, the baby is sleeping."
"Honey, I understand that billy has practice right now, but we can't take him, THE BABY IS ASLEEP."
What a fucking stupid thing to say.
For all the difficulties, children are rejuvenating and fun and provide purpose to life.
Wonder if these changes are more like jettisoning luxuries rather than getting dumber.
Childlike curiosity is slightly contagious. It’s also fun to experience it by proxy through your kids seeing things for the first time.
When you say you don't daydream, you mean you don't think about non task related things? How do you experience daydreams? Is it a nonvoluntary thing or is it more like actually going to sleep - deliberately entering a contemplative state where your mind wanders?
("This is your brain on kids!")
There are two parts worth quoting:
> Although cortical reductions sometimes reflect a process of neurodegeneration, they can also be a sign of refinement and specialization of neural circuits. Adolescence, for instance, is a life period characterized by the continued elimination of redundant synapses (i.e. synaptic pruning) which parallels cognitive and emotional development (Selemon 2013). In the context of the transition to parent-hood, several examples across human and non-human mammals show functional improvements after reductions in brain markers (Pawluski et al. 2022).
And:
> Although we found converging evidence of cortical reductions across the two samples, a number of divergent findings also emerged. First, when disentangling the cortical volume reduction, Californian fathers displayed significant reductions in area and Spanish fathers in thickness. Changes in the area may reflect changes in the number of cells located between radial columns of the brain, while changes in thickness may reflect changes in the number of cells within ontogenic columns (Petanjek et al. 2011). Secondly, the volume of the dorsal attentional network, which supports goal-directed attention, was significantly reduced in Spanish fathers, while it did not show significant changes in Californian fathers. Combined with the default mode network, this network may control sustained attention (Spreng et al. 2010, 2013), a behavior that is often required during childrearing. It is possible that these inconsistent results at the statistical level may be due to the different scan timing windows or to cultural or behavioral differences. For example, due to more generous paternity leave policies in Spain
1: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/33/7/4156/6691667
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47986349