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Family with a toddler: cotton wool in the head
Photo:
Johner / DEEPOL by plainpicture
Who gets the most sleep in your family?
Who was awake at 11 p.m., 3 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. last night to feed a baby or allay a school child's fear of monsters?
Usually it's the mothers.
You pay for it with dark circles under your eyes, cotton wool in your head and a bad mood.
Scientists have been intensively studying the sleep of men and women for several years.
One result: Although men sleep slightly less overall over the course of their lives, women's sleep is interrupted more often.
Especially in middle age, when children in families are small.
This was recently revealed by a study that examined the sleep of almost 70,000 adults worldwide.
What sounds harmless at first has massive consequences: if you don't sleep much, you might as well drink a glass of wine for breakfast.
Four nights with only five hours of sleep each reduce the ability to concentrate as much as an alcohol level of 0.6 per mille in the blood.
This was shown by studies by the German Aerospace Center.
The dangerous thing: The test subjects overestimated their own performance.
The typical “It’s okay” that mothers – and fathers – use to get through sleepless times can be really dangerous in an emergency.
By the way, also for those who worry: A permanent lack of sleep not only makes you susceptible to infections, it makes you eat unhealthily and act more riskily.
It also contributes to the narrowing and hardening of blood vessels.
This in turn can lead to serious illnesses such as strokes or heart attacks.
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The sad thing is that while work makes men sick, caring for others makes women sick.
In quite a few families, especially when the children are younger, those who “work” or are employed naturally get the sleep at night.
The reason: He - usually the man - simply needs sleep more urgently.
The argument is doubly perfidious: firstly, it ignores the performance of the person who takes on the daily care work in the family, and secondly, it downplays how physically and emotionally demanding this is.
According to the current time use survey by the Federal Statistical Office, women will still do almost 44 percent more care work than men in 2022;
Women with children under six years of age do a total of almost 50 (!) hours of unpaid care work per week.
The care provided at night is not recorded separately.
But it clearly makes a difference whether we as mothers - or fathers - find peace and relaxation at night or are woken up several times, often over the course of years, because the baby is crying or the school child needs to be accompanied to sleep after a nightmare.
Those who sleep undisturbed have energy and performance for everyday tasks and can contribute completely differently to work and society.
On an individual level, it is very clear how equal opportunities could be ensured when it comes to sleeping: by couples making their children a common cause - and not just during the day.
Even if the baby only accepts or is breastfed by mom at night, dad can also change and care for him early in the morning.
And at night, men's hands generally rock the baby to sleep just as well or poorly as women's hands.
Separate bedrooms at times and clear agreements like “you until midnight, me until morning” can work wonders here.
Fathers can just as easily change diapers, give bottles and comfort them at night – if mothers let them.
But that's exactly what's still lacking in 2024.
Fathers do want to spend time with their children – at least to some extent.
In fact, most of them disappear back into the office no later than two months after the birth.
Last year's fathers' report, which received a lot of attention, showed that mothers, not fathers, still predominantly take parental leave for significantly longer periods of time.
Women, not men, reduce their working hours as soon as they have children.
Fathers often work more after the birth of their children than before.
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Photo: Johner / DEEPOL by plainpicture
Fairly distributed sleep – and thus urgently needed recovery – also requires appropriate political and economic framework conditions.
Why has the two-week paid leave after the birth for fathers still not been implemented in Germany, two years after it became an EU-wide directive?
A father is currently suing the Federal Republic of Germany for damages.
Why is there still no protection against dismissal for expectant fathers?
The result would be more planning for fathers
and
companies.
Why is the receipt of full parental allowance not linked to the equal distribution of the months of parental leave?
All measures that would clearly encourage men to start working in care early.
And this is exactly what is crucial for the fair distribution of family care and gainful employment.
Unfortunately, the reality in young families is usually like this: behind every successful working man there is a woman with dark circles under her eyes.
Nobody has to pull the blanket over their head in disillusionment.
Change is possible.
On a private level, couples could renegotiate responsibilities.
And a lot is also possible at the entrepreneurial level: flexible and location-independent working, saving time budgets for care-intensive phases of life or job sharing are already being implemented in many places.
Labor law already offers scope today.
However, it also requires the (political) will to do so.
And broad social acceptance for appropriate family-friendly paths.