NEW ORLEANS – Mothers of young children aren't likely to be surprised by a recent study showing that they are more sleep deprived than are their male partners and women without children, but the findings are important because they underscore the need for sleep education in families with children, the investigators said.
Dr. Daniel P. Chapman and his colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta used data from the 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) for the study, which included 72,576 adult participants from the ongoing, state-based, random-digit dialing survey of community-based adults.
Married women with children were significantly more likely than were married men to report insufficient sleep (34% vs. 27%), and both married women and married men with children were more likely than were their married, gender-matched counterparts without children to report insufficient sleep (34% vs. 21%, and 27% vs. 16%, respectively).
The same was true among unmarried women with and without children (36% vs. 27%), and for unmarried men with and without children (31% vs. 25%), Dr. Chapman reported in a poster at the American Psychiatric Association's Institute on Psychiatric Services.
Of note, married women without children reported significantly more sleep insufficiency than did married men without children (21% vs. 16%), but the same did not hold true for unmarried women and men, who reported similar rates of sleep insufficiency (27% and 25%, respectively).
The findings indicate that sleep insufficiency is more prevalent in households with children and among women with children, compared with their partners, Dr. Chapman noted. “These findings suggest the need for sleep education among families with children–particularly for mothers–and corroborate the importance of sleep as a facet of women's health,” he concluded.
Respondents in this study were considered to have insufficient sleep if they reported feeling that they did not get enough sleep on 14 or more of the 30 days prior to the survey. The survey was conducted in 18 states and the District of Columbia.