New fathers scrape under seven hours of sleep a night

The toll a new baby takes on a mother's sleep is well documented, but what happens to fathers has never been properly established. Fathers are woken by the same infant, yet research has largely treated postpartum sleep as a maternal issue. Without pooled figures, nobody could say whether new dads merely feel tired or are genuinely sleeping below healthy levels. This review set out to answer that question with all the available global data on paternal sleep across the first 24 months after birth.

The researchers systematically searched three databases, Scopus, PsycINFO and PubMed, for original research published up to the end of August 2024 that reported quantitative sleep outcomes in fathers during the first 24 months after a birth. Both self-reported and objectively measured sleep counted. They found 47 eligible studies from 17 countries covering 9684 fathers, with most of the data, 26 studies, coming from North America. Results across studies were then pooled statistically, primarily using models that allow for differences between studies.

Fathers' pooled average sleep duration was 398.29 minutes a night, which is well under seven hours. They averaged 1.14 awakenings per night, and spent an average of 36.57 minutes awake after first falling asleep. A smaller number of studies used the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and the pooled score of 5.93 pointed to poor sleep overall. The studies disagreed with each other substantially on all the main measures, and the authors found only some evidence of fathers sleeping below recommended levels, with the size of any deficit depending on which sleep measure was used.

This appears to be the first attempt to pool global data on paternal postpartum sleep, so it fills a genuine gap rather than confirming or overturning earlier findings. It complements the established picture of disrupted maternal sleep by showing fathers are measurably affected too, though the strength of that conclusion varies by measure. The heavy weighting towards North American fathers is a real limitation, since access to paternity leave differs enormously between the United States and other countries. Whether fathers with generous leave sleep better remains an open question.

If you are expecting a child or in the thick of the first two years, this is a reason to plan for genuinely shortened and fragmented sleep rather than assuming the disruption lands only on the mother. An average of under seven hours a night, with roughly one awakening and over half an hour of wakefulness after sleep onset, describes a real deficit for many men. It is also a reason to treat persistent daytime exhaustion as a predictable feature of this life stage, not a personal failing. The honest uncertainty is how much any individual father's experience matches the average.