Tips for new parents to improve wellbeing and reduce tiredness
Researchers at Dublin City University have developed a workshop to help first-time parents manage sleep deprivation and improve overall wellbeing. The program emphasizes realistic expectations regarding newborn sleep cycles and provides practical strategies like 'brain dumping' to reduce nighttime anxiety.
Why it matters
Addressing parental fatigue is essential for long-term family health and relationship stability, offering evidence-based solutions to a common public health challenge.
Dublin City University’s Restful Nights, Happy Days project has devised a 90-minute online workshop for first-time parents to be delivered between 28 and 35 weeks in their pregnancy.
The aim is to enhance the wellbeing of new parents , improve sleep quality and reduce feelings of tiredness and fatigue.
If parents are more aware of what normal newborn sleep patterns look like, they can have more realistic expectations. It’s particularly important, says postdoctoral researcher Aileen Leech, that they realise infants consolidate their sleep over 24 hours, whereas adults typically do that over eight hours.
“We highlight that newborns are not born with the developed circadian rhythm, so that they will naturally wake every two to four hours for feeding or for comfort over a 24-hour period,” she says.
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