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jonplackett
The control group should still be sleep deprived for 6 months and see what that does to their brain.
mynegation
As a father of a newborn never have I ever seen an HN comment so incisive and to the point.
LeifCarrotson
As the father of a 9-year-old I have to warn you: the sleep deprivation does not end at 6 months.
Aurornis
As a father of multiple kids younger than that, I have a very different experience.
I’m sorry you’re going through this, but I’m slightly taken aback by this comment because this isn’t a common feature of having older children. The only parents I know having sleep deprivation problems have very young children. I have a lot of parent friends and I’ve never heard anyone claim that sleep deprivation continued until older ages, let alone that it’s common.
jonplackett
Yeah it comes and goes doesn’t it. My 8 year old started waking us up twice a night for a week a while back!
But subjecting non-parents to 9 years of sleep deprivation would definitely be against the Geneva convention.
apaprocki
The battlefield changes as kids age. It’s impossible to have any realistic discussion about sleep habits without discussing the elephant in the room. What is your device policy and how do you manage screen time, what your bedtime routine is (you better have one!) and how good you are at sticking to the timing on a daily basis.
pplante
As a father of three, ages 4, 5.88, and 9 I can concur that the sleep deprivation doesn't improve much. Especially if they are neurodivergent.
senectus1
My son started sleeping through at 6 weeks... my daughter on the hand took more than twice that to start sleeping through. she was hard work.
ray_v
Congrats and guard your sleep hygiene as much as possible (practically impossible advice to follow in most cases).
I went through a really rough period because of the lack of sleep. I noticed that hydration during that period was also challenging, so I wonder if this is related to the brain shrink effect.
jonplackett
Ah thanks! This is the nicest response to a comment I’ve received.
Hang in there with the 6 month old. It gets easier every month. Mine are 4 and 8 now. Sometimes I really miss having a tiny baby - but I do like sleeping now.
gentooflux
Without all the oxytocin you get from hanging out with a newborn that would be awful
dotancohen
Completely correct. With all three of my children I was sleep deprived the first few months. But never in my life have I felt better.
For all the difficulties, children are rejuvenating and fun and provide purpose to life.
herpdyderp
These brain chemical rewards apparently do not work on me, my (still young) kids provide no such rejuvenation. Luckily I'm a deep sleeper so I have no sleep deprivation problems.
functionmouse
Parents are supposed to sleep when the baby sleeps. Industrial work culture does not allow this. One of the many things leading the "Western" lifestyle to extinction.
dbacar
The babies I know yet don't sleep like adults which means that you will be up at night at random hours that you are not used to and I think this has nothing to do with industrial work culture. That 6-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is just a "dream" :).
I recall, as a twins dad, I did not have 2+ hours of uninterrupted sleep till they are 2 years old. (This depends on the kid though).
ozlikethewizard
Prior to the industrial revolution polyphasic sleep was pretty standard:
conception
More that babies are designed for the tribe/family/group to all share in the responsibility of caring for the baby.
Though feeding schedules early on are still grueling.
homeonthemtn
This is funny in how cut and dry it is. My friend, do you have kids?
It's my theory that crying evolved as a trait because it forces parents to go find some place safe lest a predator finds them, thus ensuring the helpless kid can grow in safe environments.
Note that there is no mention of sleep in there. That's bonus round if you get it.
watwut
Non western parents gets woken up in the night and sleep deprived ... and then have duties during the day while the baby sleeps
irishcoffee
[flagged]
andsoitis
Why? Isn’t sleep deprivation a consequence of having a child?
karamanolev
They should be sleep deprived the same way for it to be a real control group, at least in the context of "becoming a father". Otherwise it's just "being sleep deprived for 6-12 months has X effect", which is much less informative. We already know being sleep deprived for long stretches is really bad.
andsoitis
but then you're not comparing what it is like to be father with what it like to not be a father.
such an experimental design would miss the forest for the trees.
IncreasePosts
Yes, so then that way you would know if there's something special about raising children that causes cerebellum shrinkage, or if it is just run of the mill sleep deprivation that causes it
m463
reducing exercise does this kind of thing too. I assume new dads also stop exercise (of all kinds).
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philjohn
I'd need to read the actual paper, but isn't poor sleep also correlated with "shrinkage" in the brain? And when you have a baby, sleep is one of those things that you don't typically get enough, or high enough quality, of.
dnnddidiej
Indeed I dont daydream anymore.
Wonder if these changes are more like jettisoning luxuries rather than getting dumber.
pavel_lishin
Father of a ten year old here; I definitely still daydream, and I think I did for most of the time I've been a father - but it's genuinely difficult to remember that sort of thing.
trelane
I also still daydream and have well before and after kids. If anything, sleep depravation with a newborn made it more vibrant and integrated.
pavel_lishin
I wonder if it's some sort of adaptive mechanism, to prevent new sleep-deprived parents from completely losing the plot. Less daydreaming might mean more paying attention to this screaming thing that just fell out of you, and to every predator it's probably attracting from miles around.
HPsquared
The brain switching away from "explore" mode.
Aurornis
Becoming a parent changes a lot of how you think, but to be honest spending time with my kids did more to reignite my explore mode.
Childlike curiosity is slightly contagious. It’s also fun to experience it by proxy through your kids seeing things for the first time.
xenocratus
I mostly stopped daydreaming at some point in my 20s too, after a fairly intense daydreaming life until then. Oh, and no kids yet :) so it could just be "life"
idiotsecant
I wonder what people mean when they talk about daydreaming? I think perhaps it's an experience I don't have, or perhaps constantly have? I have pretty strong and untreated inattentive type ADHD so maybe my whole life is a daydream.
When you say you don't daydream, you mean you don't think about non task related things? How do you experience daydreams? Is it a nonvoluntary thing or is it more like actually going to sleep - deliberately entering a contemplative state where your mind wanders?
7thpower
Yes, this thread made me realize I may not understand what daydreaming is.
jazzyb
Yeah, saying "I don't daydream" sounds like "I don't have thoughts" to me. Am I always daydreaming, or have I never daydreamed?
lostmsu
My interpretation of "daydreaming" is pre-nap or early into a nap (your nap, no kids involved) state where your mind wanders, but the experience is closer to dreaming than to thinking of random stuff.
npilk
("This is your brain on kids!")
beshrkayali
The title of the article is more on the sensationalist side unfortunately, the actual paper gives a different view [1].
There are two parts worth quoting:
> Although cortical reductions sometimes reflect a process of neurodegeneration, they can also be a sign of refinement and specialization of neural circuits. Adolescence, for instance, is a life period characterized by the continued elimination of redundant synapses (i.e. synaptic pruning) which parallels cognitive and emotional development (Selemon 2013). In the context of the transition to parent-hood, several examples across human and non-human mammals show functional improvements after reductions in brain markers (Pawluski et al. 2022).
And:
> Although we found converging evidence of cortical reductions across the two samples, a number of divergent findings also emerged. First, when disentangling the cortical volume reduction, Californian fathers displayed significant reductions in area and Spanish fathers in thickness. Changes in the area may reflect changes in the number of cells located between radial columns of the brain, while changes in thickness may reflect changes in the number of cells within ontogenic columns (Petanjek et al. 2011). Secondly, the volume of the dorsal attentional network, which supports goal-directed attention, was significantly reduced in Spanish fathers, while it did not show significant changes in Californian fathers. Combined with the default mode network, this network may control sustained attention (Spreng et al. 2010, 2013), a behavior that is often required during childrearing. It is possible that these inconsistent results at the statistical level may be due to the different scan timing windows or to cultural or behavioral differences. For example, due to more generous paternity leave policies in Spain
1: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/33/7/4156/6691667
ozozozd
Thank you!
amelius
Evolution packed us full of control mechanisms that work against us (the individual) but in favor of the group.
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vegabook
more flawed[1] don't-have-kids "science" but then they complain about demographics.
zulux
And grows your heart.
eternal_braid
It needs a (2002) and it is behind a paywall.
tkcranny
2022
walletdrainer
One would expect that the HN users who care about such things would already be aware of the paywall on economist.com
theonemind
As someone who cares about such a thing and had no awareness of that, I would tend to disagree. Nytimes gets posted enough that I have encountered the pay wall, but the economist, I’d have had to guess. I also tried to look at the article and didn’t see the year when trying to open the truncated article, and do like to know that I have started reading something old. I just don’t really agree with your comment at all from almost any angle, but I don’t think either one of us has numbers to back up anything
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