The Night Shift

Before the baby arrived, they had a plan. They would take turns. He would do weekend nights and she would do weekdays, or they would split each night in half. Couples describe these plans to me with a kind of fondness, the way people talk about a holiday they never took.

Then the baby came, and within a few weeks she was the one getting up. Almost every woman I've interviewed about the early years tells a version of this. The plan didn't fail all at once. It wore away.

How it wears away

The first reason is physical, at least at the start. If she is breastfeeding, the night feeds are hers by necessity. That is real. But it sets a pattern that outlasts the feeding. By the time the baby takes a bottle or sleeps longer, she is already the one who wakes at the first sound, and he has learned to sleep through it.

The second reason is the job argument. He has to work in the morning. Often she does too, or will soon. But his work is treated as the thing to protect, and her return to work is something she will manage somehow. I wrote about that assumption in Whose Time Counts.

The third reason is quieter. She hears the baby first because she has been the one listening. Hearing is partly habit, and habits come from repetition.

What the research found

There is less research on this than you might expect, given how common the experience seems. One study I keep returning to is by David Maume, Rachel Sebastian and Anthony Bardo, published in Gender & Society in 2010. They interviewed 25 working-class, dual-earner couples with children. Women's sleep was more often cut short and interrupted by family needs. Most of the men protected their sleep, and many justified it by their role as the main provider.

It is a small study and it can't tell us how common the pattern is across all families. But the mechanism it describes, sleep as something a provider is entitled to, matches what I hear from women in very different circumstances, including women who earn more than their husbands.

What it costs beyond the hours

The obvious cost is exhaustion. Months of broken sleep affect mood, patience, health and work. The cost that interests me more is structural.

The person who handles the nights becomes the person who knows the baby best. She knows which cry means hunger and which means a nappy. She knows the medicine dose, where the thermometer is and when a fever means calling the doctor. That knowledge makes her the expert, and the expert becomes the default for everything else. Night duty in the first year often decides who will be the parent on call for the next ten.

It also shapes how she sees her partner. Several women told me the nights were where their resentment started, because the nights were the clearest measure of whose rest counted. One said she would lie awake after a feed listening to him breathe, and that she had never felt so alone in a full bed.

What couples who share the nights do

The couples who manage to share the nights make it a structure instead of a matter of goodwill. They assign shifts, and the off-duty partner sleeps in another room so that the rest is real. Some use expressed milk or formula for one feed so that he can take it. They treat his first nights alone with the baby as a skill to learn.

And they protect the arrangement from the job argument by deciding in advance that both jobs count. If his morning matters, so does hers.

Sleep is the most basic form of rest. Who gets it, in the year a child arrives, says a great deal about the kind of household being built.