Mom depression link to bad baby sleep pattern
Your baby’s first six months of life are crucial to developing the regular sleeping and waking patterns, known as circadian rhythms, that he’ll need for a healthy future – but some children may start life with the sleep odds stacked against them, say University of Michigan sleep experts. They’ve found that babies whose moms experienced depression any time before they became pregnant, or developed mood problems while they were pregnant, are much more prone to having chaotic sleep patterns in the first half-year of life than babies born to non-depressed moms.
For instance, infants born to depressed moms nap more during the day, take much longer to settle down to sleep at night, and wake up more often during the night. It’s a baby form of the insomnia that millions of adults know all too well. Not only does this add to parents’ sleepless nights, but it may help set these children up for their own depression later in life.
However, this doesn’t mean that babies born to depressed moms are doomed to follow in their moms’ shoes, even though depression does tend to run in families, says lead researcher Roseanne Armitage, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at U-M Medical School. Nor does it mean that parents who haven’t suffered depression can ignore the importance of their babies’ sleep.
Rather, it means that all parents – especially ones with a history of depression – must pay close attention to the conditions they create for their infant’s sleep, from birth. “Keeping a very regular sleep schedule is incredibly important,” says Armitage. “We know that for both children and adults, and from this study we now know that for infants, the more stable the bedtime the less chaotic sleep is during the night.”
The researchers compared a group of moms who sought help for depression during pregnancy from the U-M Depression Center’s Women’s Mood Disorders Program with a group of moms who had no past or current depression. Each group agreed to wear wristwatch-like devices called actigraphs, which measure sleep time at night, light exposure and daytime activity/rest patterns. The moms began wearing the devices during the last trimester of pregnancy, and then after their babies were born the team fitted each child with a tiny actigraph at the age of 2 weeks. Then, the team downloaded the information from the devices every month until the babies were 8 months old.
So far, the analysis of the data they collected show that babies born to depressed moms had little or no evidence of an in-born 24-hour circadian rhythm soon after they were born – unlike the babies born to women who weren’t depressed. This irregular pattern continued until the study ended in the babies’ eighth month.
Those first few months are a kind of training camp for the baby’s sleep in the future, Armitage says. Babies’ bodies and brains need to be trained to understand that they should sleep when it’s dark, and be awake when it’s light – the basic circadian rhythm that governs sleep patterns for a person’s entire life. This sets the baby’s “body clock” right from the start. Of course, infants and toddlers need to nap during the daytime to get all the sleep they need – 11-18 hours for newborns in the first two months, 11-15 hours for the next 10 months, and 12-14 hours from ages 1 to 3 years.
Of course, newborns wake up in the night when they need food – but Armitage says that going to bed at the same time, getting up at the same time, and establishing rituals around the bedtime helps infants begin to distinguish between night sleep and day sleep. “Put your baby in day clothes for naps, and in night clothes for night sleep – babies pick up these cues.” Parents can also make sure that babies are regularly around bright light during the day, which helps the body develop circadian rhythms linked to light cycles. Of course, the bright light shouldn’t shine directly in babies’ eyes, and they should be shielded from direct sunlight or wear sunscreen outside.
By 4 months of age, a baby’s sleep schedule should have become regular, more focused on nighttime sleep, and their blocks of sleep longer, especially at night. The main thing, Armitage says, is to make sure babies and small children get enough sleep on an increasingly regular schedule – and that their moms do too.
The period immediately after giving birth is a high-risk time for depression, even in women who have never had depression before. Those who’ve had depression, or have relatives who have suffered depression, are most at risk and it can be worsened by lack of sleep – or perhaps even partly triggered by it. “Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with an elevated risk for depression in everybody, at all stages of life, but in new moms, because of the hormonal changes and the need to recover from the pregnancy and birth, sleep deprivation can really be a problem,” says Armitage. “It can interfere with the social rhythms that are important for keeping the circadian clock in the brain in sync, it can minimize the amount of energy moms have to care for their infants, and it can contribute to the development of depression.”