A baby whose mother is depressed is more likely to be woken up needlessly, and consequently suffer from disrupted sleep patterns, compared to otherwise healthy mothers, researchers from The Pennsylvania State University and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine reported in the journal Child Development.

Co-author, Douglas M. Teti, said:

“We found that mothers with high depressive symptom levels are more likely to excessively worry about their infants at night than mothers with low symptom levels, and that such mothers were more likely to seek out their babies at night and spend more time with their infants than mothers with low symptom levels.

This, in turn, was associated with increased night waking in the infants of depressed mothers, compared to the infants of non-depressed mothers. Especially interesting about this was that when depressed mothers sought out their infants at night, their infants did not appear to be in need of parental help. They were either sound asleep or perhaps awake, but not distressed. “

The researchers found that mother with low levels of depressive symptoms or worry seldom disturbed their babies while they were fast asleep – they would only go into baby’s room at night if the child was distressed.

There was also evidence (less strong) that babies who regularly woke up during the night could contribute to higher depressive symptoms in mothers. The authors stressed, however, that the evidence for this infant-driven pathway was not as compelling.

Pediatricians say that the two main concerns new parents come to them about, are feeding and sleeping problems.

The authors explain that there is usually no reason to wake up a baby who is soundly asleep, if there are no signs of distress. They added that if depression in a parent, or even undue worry, leads to disruption in the infant’s and parents’ sleep, there could be undesirable consequences for the long-term parent-child relationship.

In such situations, the authors explain, doctors should consider taking steps to reduce parental distress.

Teti said:

“One has to examine the health of the family system and address the problem at that level. If frequent infant night waking is waking parents up every night and causing parental distress, there are established interventions to help babies learn how to develop self-regulated sleep.”

If a baby is being woken up out of a sound sleep because the mother is distressed, however, doctors should perhaps consider other approaches, Teti said. Other approaches may include:

  • Intervention to reduce maternal depression

  • Address needless worries about the baby’s night-time sleeping behavior

  • Encourage support from the spouse

  • Give parents information about how important and beneficial a good night’s sleep is for the whole family

They found a close link between maternal depressive symptoms and a feeling of having lost control and being helpless.

The researchers found a correlation between the mothers’ night-time behavior with their infants and night-time infant waking, but no correlation between their behavior with their infants at bedtime and infant night waking.

Douglas M. Teti, and co-researcher Brian Crosby examined information on 45 babies, aged from 1 to 24 months, as part of the larger SIESTA Study of Infants’ Emergent Sleep Trajectories). They gathered data on child and parents over seven consecutive days – in this study the mothers had kept an infant sleep diary. The mothers completed two surveys at the start of the study – one focused on symptoms of depression, while the other concentrated on maternal worries about their babies when they awakened during the night.

They set up video cameras at strategic places on the sixth data of data collections, the cameras looked at:

  • Where the infant slept

  • The door of the baby’s bedroom, to see who was coming in and out

  • Where the parents took their baby when he/she was woken up

Approximately 10 to 12 hours of video footage was collected for each family, starting with the baby’s bedtime. They found that what the parents reported correlated with what they saw on the videos.

Teti said:

“In terms of understanding what predicts parenting at night, and how parenting at night affects children, it’s important to examine parenting at night much more closely than we have. There’s probably a lot going on at night that we need to understand, and we need to use actual observations of what parents are doing. We know very little about nighttime parenting.”

Written by Christian Nordqvist