It’s not exactly surprising news that new parents don’t get a lot of sleep. Research says new parents lose about 44 days of sleep in the first year of their newborn’s life, according to the Daily Mail. In fact, new parents often get about 5.1 hours of sleep per night.
But that number may be even lower when the child is first born. BabyCenter blogger Sara McGinnis had her sister-in-law, who had just given birth to a baby girl, Alison, use Fitbit’s sleep tracker app to monitor “how things change after baby arrives.”
The Fitbit tracker, which measured her sister-in-law’s sleep patterns for several nights the week of Alison's birth, showed that the new mother wasn't anywhere close to even getting a total of eight hours of sleep per day. McGinnis wrote it was just "an average of four hours and four minutes a day, with no one period of sleep lasting so much as three hours."
McGinnis said she hopes these charts will teach people how difficult it can be to sleep while raising a newborn.
“My heart goes out to all of you going through sleep deprivation right now,” McGinnis wrote in her post. “Know that someday you will snooze again, and in the meantime here’s hoping your little one is a(s) darling as this sweet thing.”
For more on raising a newborn:
This photo gallery of newborns shows the importance of documenting your baby's first year
Your newborn could be at risk if he or she doesn't have a name at birth
This is what you look like to a newborn baby
Herb Scribner is a writer for Deseret News National. Send him an email at hscribner@deseretdigital.com or follow him on Twitter @herbscribner.