MBG1-2: It’s like from the beginning when I had myfirst born I thought was a bit
sleepless in the night time and then I just sat down and start realizing, if I won’t
accept this and then I think this situation is gonna go worse for me so I rather accept
and that at the beginning of the situation is how I managed to deal with my babies.
MBG1-1: Mothers should be aware before having the baby that, you know, there
are going to be sleepless nights. And it’ll be different.
In contrast to the idea of just moving on, various participants reported‘coping’
with the demands of tiredness and sleep deprivation. The valence of these state-
ments was more negative, with the idea of coping coming about simply out of
necessity.
BFSG2-E: I think your body becomes used to sleep deprivation. I think it really
does, I think you learn to cope on broken sleep. You learn to cope on 5 h sleep.
BFSG2-B: Especially having an older one you have to get up and get dressed and
get breakfast, take her somewhere and do something fun even if you’re absolutely
shattered.’Cause you have to.
PS-A: At that moment in time when you’re going through that you think it’s the
worst thing in the world and you think‘How will I cope?’, then when you’ve had
an hour’s sleep and you’ve woke up you think‘Ah, actually she wasn’t that bad’.
There were also clearly defined limits to coping for many of the participants.
Acceptance or‘getting on with it’ was possible only up to a certain point.
Accumulated sleep deficit over time was raised as a reason for reaching the
breaking point—here prolonged tiredness (accumulated sleep pressure) appears to
shift into acute fatigue:
PS-D: The cumulative effect with [my older daughter] was, it was, it was the
cumulative effect. At the moment I can cope with [my baby daughter]. She’s up two
times a night and I can cope with that. But when it’s going on and on for months
and months and months and you’re not getting proper sleep...it’s unbelievable.
BFSG1-D: You know, you can go for so many days...say I’m up four times a night
I can accept that and that’sfine. But when I’m having 5, 6, 7 times in a night, then
you get...obviously...I’ve had two days of that and then that’s when I’m just like...
[trails off]...There was a night when he was screaming for about 45 min which he
doesn’t normally do but for about three days of doing it and I thought‘If this is
going to be the norm I’m going to die’
Using the narrative accounts above, we propose a Baby-Lag Parental Fatigue
Scale that could be developed for use in future research to capture the subjective
experience of Baby-Lag (Box1). Our aim here would be to assess the mother’s
experience of Baby-Lag, its impact, how it makes her feel (emotionally and
physically), and its severity based on the language she uses to describe it (i.e., her
subjectively felt experience). In our next project, we plan to test these descriptors
with new mothers, refine the language used to capture their experiences, and verify
shared understanding of the phenomena using pile sorting and similar techniques.
3 Baby-Lag: Methods for Assessing Parental Tiredness and Fatigue 41