Chapter 3
Baby-Lag: Methods for Assessing Parental
Tiredness and Fatigue
Alanna E.F. Rudzik and Helen L. Ball
Introduction
Altered sleep patterns, inadequate sleep, and fatigue are extremely common among
new parents and form a major part of life in the postpartum period. Thefirst months of
anewinfant’s life are a time of extensive adjustment for families, and the experience of
newparenthoodisoftencoloredbysleep deprivation and chronic tiredness—what has
popularly been termed‘Baby-Lag’(Anonymous2012 ). Studies of stress, depression,
anxiety, and measures of parenting function and behaviors would all benefit from the
inclusion of information about parental tiredness and fatigue. However, the measure-
ment of states of tiredness and fatigue is complex and inconsistent. Some success has
been achieved in objectively quantifying sleep loss and tiredness, but (as discussed
below) only in restricted settings unrelatedtoparentingintheearlypostpartum.
In this chapter, we review existing‘etic’, or externally generated methods that
measure fatigue and tiredness and assess their relevance and feasibility for use with new
parents in the earliestphase of their children’s lives. Objective measures including
polysomnography, actigraphy and psychomotor vigilance tests have been widely used
in the clinical arena. Subjective measures in which the respondents rate their sleep
within a given period, report on some aspects of sleep, or give details of their sleep
ecologyhavebeenusedinclinicalpopulations and extended into community studies.
A.E.F. Rudzik (&)
Department of Anthropology, State University of New York College at Oneonta, Oneonta,
NY, USA; Parent-Infant Sleep Laboratory, Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
H.L. Ball
Department of Anthropology, Parent-Infant Sleep Laboratory,
Durham University, Durham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
L.L. Sievert and D.E. Brown (eds.),Biological Measures of Human
Experience across the Lifespan: Making Visible the Invisible,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44103-0_3
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